Misadventures in the bush

Oct 08, 2011

Reposted below is the complete journal of Gordon and Stewart's trek through Mustang, Nepal, in chronological order.

The Royal Audience

It’s time for our audience with the raja.

There’s just one problem.

“What else can I wear?” I ask my son, Gordon.

I mean it literally. The raja and his remnant kingdom are tucked high in the Himalayas between Tibet and Nepal at an altitude of 12,000 feet and more. And with the shadows growing long, I am cold.

So, protocol can go hang. What I want to know is whether there are any more clothes I can put on before we meet the Raja of Lo. I'm wearing a watch cap, a rain jacket, cargo pants, and long underwear. Not enough. After walking four days to get to Lo Manthang, the kingdom's ancient capital, we’ve already got on all the clean clothes we brought with us. And most of the dirty ones.

I feel a little guilty. I spent nearly four years representing the United States in meetings with foreign officials -- meetings where it was a major faux pas to wear the wrong lapel pin. The kingdom of Lo has can trace its roots to 1380; it has had a king about three times as long as the United States has had a president. And I am going to sit down with its king wearing dusty hiking shoes and a watch cap.

I am pretty sure our protocol officer wouldn’t have approved.

Our guide entered the room. “Quickly please!” he said. “The raja will see you now.” I rise to my feet and head down to the street, stopping only to tuck a small bottle of local whiskey into my pocket.

Saturday, May 14

The bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara bumps and squeals down the steep, winding grade. The high-pitched squeal of brakes is an annoyance, except when the road pitches down and we can see, too easily, over the road’s edge. Then, the wail of the brakes has a kind of comfort in it.

We are leaving behind the press and clamor of Kathmandu. Out on narrow terraces eked from steep hillsides, we see farmers harvesting corn, cutting down everything and carrying out bundles of corn stalks on their backs.

Hours later we arrive in Pokhara – a bustling little south Asian town at Annapurna’s feet. The next day, we are up early for the short flight around Annapurna to Jomsom.

Sunday, May 15

We arrive at 5:30 for a 6 am flight. At 6, nothing has happened. We're on Nepal time now. When it finally takes off a couple of hours later, the flight rises over some steep hills, turns right at the giant peak, then cruises up a steep valley, with mountains rising above us on both sides.

The plane doesn’t exactly descend to land in Jomsom. We just keep flying at more or less the same altitude until the airfield rises to meet us.

Jomsom was until recently the jumping off point for most treks into the ancient kingdom of Lo. The kingdom and the territory around it are now known as Mustang, and Mustang has long been restricted territory. Foreigners were barred until the 1990s, and even now a permit (and a hefty fee) is required to trek in Mustang. Jomsom is the administrative and governmental capital of the region.

Nepal’s officials check our permits for the Mustang restricted area. They also tell us to change our plans. Our entire trek was planned around a festival in Lo Manthang – a religious ceremony featuring indigenous music, dancing, masks and costumes. But it turns out to be a moveable feast, and the event has been moved back a couple of weeks. We can't postpone our trek at this point. We'll have to miss the festival. It’s like this morning’s flight, I think. If you’re on a timetable, you’re bound to be disappointed in Nepal. Rolling with the flow is the only path to contentment. And, on trips like this, nominal goals like the festival are in the end a kind of maguffin – the term Alfred Hitchcock used for the otherwise meaningless object that drives the plot.

Besides, we've got another maguffin. Three of them, actually. We’re carrying books and toys for three of Mustang’s schools. This is almost a tradition for us; when we hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru, we brought a bunch of our kids' outgrown toys and helped a local group distribute them at a mountain schoolhouse. This time, I've gotten advice about local schools from the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation. Our kids are grown, and their kids are too young to have castoff toys, so I've solicited contributions from friends and colleagues, who have loaded us up with 25 pounds of books and toys. We need to find the schools and drop off three loads as we work our way up the valley to Lo Manthang. Our first dropoff is in Kagbeni, at the end of today's hike.

Mustang is in the rainshadow of the Himalayas, with annual rainfall roughly equivalent to the Great Plains of North America. The mountain slopes are steep and arid but they do not drop into a V-shaped valley. Instead they stop abruptly at a wide flat expanse of gravel with a thin braided river – the Kali Gandaki – wandering among the rocks. The original valley floor must have filled with centuries of glacial runoff. Perhaps someday this will be a pastoral scene, with a river ambling back and forth through grassy meadows. But for now the valley holds nothing but softball-sized rocks from edge to edge. In this whole expanse, there is one tree and no grass. The valley must be filled with raging snowmelt each spring, stripping away any plants that have gained a foothold since the last flood.

Working up the valley, we cross the braided river a couple of times on wooden bridges cobbled together from random debris. Then our path rises to a new road clinging to the right side of the valley, just above the river bed. We start out at a brisk pace, but even with porters to carry much of the load, I’m soon sweating and lagging, losing ground whenever I stop to take a photo. It’s a short day, with little altitude gain, but we’re already at 2800 meters and not in hiking shape. I'm glad when, after an hour and a half of hiking, we come to a small village with a teahouse. We order sweet milky tea and rest.

Refreshed, another half an hour of walking brings us to Kagbeni. The lodge has a great glassed-in dining room overlooking the largest green patch for ten miles around – 4 acres of oats and barley that dip and wave in the constant wind like the sea. It’s mesmerizing.

Liesl Clark of the Foundation has told me to look up Kunga Tashi, who leads the School Board and runs the “Dancing Yak” Restaurant. Kunga turns out to be a strikingly young man with a passion for the school. He tells me that it has recently expanded and now takes boarders as young as four and as old as sixteen. Especially in the higher grades, almost all the kids who want an education must become boarders. There are only about six or seven schools beyond tenth grade, and they have to serve a nearly roadless region the size of West Virginia.

Thanks to foreign and Nepalese government assistance, the school charges nothing for tuition, room or board. The Foundation's contribution is an extremely well stocked library to which we'll be adding toys and some books and maps. The smallest kids are on break, and they come in to road-test the toys. The most immediate hit is a set of two blocks with half of a vehicle pictured on each face. If kids successfully pair the front and back end of the vehicle – a fire engine, say, or a motorcycle – they are rewarded with a sound that matches the vehicle.

I know just enough Nepali to communicate this concept to a gaggle of four-year olds. “G ood?” “No good?” I ask, pairing the fire engine with the motorcycle. “No good,” they shout. When I finally get it right, with their help, they are startled with delight at the fire engine's loud siren. Then each kid gets a chance to match a different vehicle and discover the sounds of success.

I am determined to get some play value from this toy because I had my doubts about bringing wooden toys, which are almost as heavy as they are politically correct. In the end, though, the weight was worth it. And the kids’ enthusiasm for the other toys – tinker toys, jigsaw puzzles, and a set of Dr. Seuss flash cards – made it feel like Christmas.

We get a tour of the school and plenty of tea. They have no computers for the kids. A Danish group had sent one a couple of years ago, but the mouse doesn’t work. At the suggestion of Liesl Clark, we've also collected laptops from friends and colleagues. These we've left with the Open Learning Exchange in Kathmandu, where they'll be refitted with Linux and some Nepali and English learning programs. Liesl asked that we not take the laptops themselves to the schools because the students and faculty will need training before the computers are actually used. Considering their weight, we're happy to oblige. In any event, the school doesn't now have table space or a free room to put computers in.

It’s building more, though. The young men at work on the new building clearly understand twenty-first century global fashion. They wear low-slung, gravity-defying pants and a variety of branded shirts. As an apparent concession to Kagbeni's constant wind, they have covered their faces, often with kerchiefs that make them look like train robbers or wannabe-anarchist WTO protesters. But their work methods are closer to the ninth century. To move a large pile of rocks fifteen feet, they form two lines and toss stones rhythmically from one worker to the next, bucket brigade style.

Leaving the school, we have time to explore Kagbeni. Women are daubing a mani wall in traditional colors made from local minerals. Mani walls hold a long string of prayer wheels. Passersby can walk to the left of the wall and turn the entire string of prayer wheels without breaking stride.

Signs of religious devotion are everywhere in Kagbeni. It is an ancient monastery town -- though it looks more like a fortress. And perhaps it was. Fortresses are established to protect valuable assets, and the most precious resource in this dry and vertical land is probably the 4 acres of flat and irrigated barley just outside our hostel. The Buddhist monastery here dates to the 1400’s and was once maintained by hundreds of monks who farmed land up and down the valley but could retreat to defend the fortified town in a time of war. Now, though, the monastery's population has dwindled to 40 – half of them students – plus a couple of remarkably large and mean guard dogs, who bark fiercely down from a rooftop that isn’t quite far enough above our heads.

The main worship room of the monastery shows telltale signs of the monastery's declining fortunes; much like an over-stretched British peer’s stately home, it mixes impressive art and history with cracked windows and tawdry modernizing touches, like the twisty fluorescent bulb that hangs down in front of a centuries-old statue of Buddha.

Monday, May 16

Today we’ll finally leave the vast gravelly bed of the Kali Gandaki river, climbing to 3,000 meters. We begin by dropping to the Kali Gandaki and crossing a few of its braided channels on makeshift wooden footbridges. The trail then takes us up onto hills and cliffs overlooking the river.

We set a blistering pace, bolstered by maximum strength ibuprofen. Sandstone rises on all sides, often as great cliffs. In a few places, manmade caves have been hacked from the sandstone, probably in the days when raiders marched regularly through the valley. The caves may once have been reached by steps and handholds carved from the rock, but these have long ago eroded away.

After a few hours, we stop for lunch at Chhusang, the last truly Nepali village along our route. From here we’ll climb away from the Kali Gandaki and into regions more influenced by Tibet's culture than Nepal’s.

Like all the villages, Chhusang's gardens have high walls to keep out wandering livestock. We walk next to a shallow stream that has been diverted to slab along the hillside and then drop to the walled gardens. There it irrigates a several-acres oasis -- startling green against a landscape that otherwise resembles the drier parts of Wyoming.

Crossing the Kali Gandaki for the last time on a metal foot bridge, we immediately begin climbing a slippery sand and gravel trail that wriggles chaotically up a steep slope – and marks the real boundary between Nepal and the ancient Tibetan kingdom of Lo.

The altitude makes itself felt now; we strain to breathe deeply enough to keep moving. After an unrelenting 15 minutes, we’ve raised our altitude two or three hundred meters and are entering Chelle, the first Tibetan village of the region.

Chelle too has the region's distinctive walled oases, dominated by stands of apple trees that look nothing like the apple trees of North America. The architecture of the town is distinctive too, and so is the atmosphere. There are far more animals; indeed, they share the town, and even the homes, with the human residents.

Cows, mules, and goats get the bottom floor of most homes, while people get the top floors. The homes feature an interior atrium, making it easy for the residents to keep an eye on their livestock. A roof closes off the atrium, often topped with glass or plastic to let in light. Otherwise, the roofs are flat, habitable spaces that add what amounts in this dry country to a third f loor. Thigh-high stacks of firewood act like balcony walls at the edge of the rooftops.

I ask whether residents burn the wood in the winter. No, I'm told. The wood is too valuable to burn. If they need a fire, most residents burn twigs and cow dung. These firewood parapets aren't about utility; they're about prestige. Firewood is so rare and expensive that having a cord or two on top of your house is a status symbol -- and thus too precious to burn.

It’s noticeably colder here, and I wonder aloud how having an open atrium works in the long Himalayan winter. Turns out, many of the villagers drive their horses and marketable livestock south along the river, sell the livestock, pen the horses, and head to balmy Pokhara to get temporary jobs.

Lo in winter is a harsh land, with waist-deep snows. But it's just a 6-day walk to a balmy climate. Who wouldn't go if they could? It reminds me of all the wheat farmers in Manitoba who lock their barns and fly to Arizona for the winter.

With every square yard of farmland precious enough to tend by hand, and every animal a part of the family home, overpopulation is always a risk. There just isn't enough land to keep subdividing it foreach new generation. In response, I’m told, the Lo people have devised some remarkable cultural innovations.

In the old days, and perhaps even today, brothers might share not just a farm, but a wife. That way, the fields can be handed down from one set of brothers to a single set of descendants. Marrying two men to one woman didn’t produce an excess of old maids, locals say, because girls were often scarce. I don’t have the heart to ask why.

In any event, the gender mismatch might not last long. If a wife didn't produce an heir, her husbands were allowed to take a second wife; the alternative, not having another generation to inherit the fields, was unthinkable.

Finally, the last resort for sons and daughters who didn't inherit or find a mate with prospects was one that the second sons of European nobles would have recognized – organized religion. Unmarried men and women were sent to monasteries where they worked and held the land in common.

Tuesday, May 17

We start today by continuing the grim uphill that brought us into Chelle, but the trail soon levels off to something more reasonable. We pass a piece of heavy machinery working on the road. Lord only knows how they got it up the slope that so disheartened us, but it’s a reminder that this region won’t be accessible only to walkers much longer.

The Chinese have already built a good dirt road from the Tibetan border to well south of Lo Manthang, so that only the country we’re hiking today separates the Nepali and the Chinese roads.

The isolation tells. We are now deep in the last traditional Tibetan territory left in the world. Rams' skulls hang over doorways. At meals we are offered Tibetan bread (lightly fried, pita-like, and tasty) and Tibetan beer imported from the other side of the border. We pass people crushing rocks by hand to make the mineral dyes that color the mani walls and the gompas, or monasteries.

Stretching our day to 8 hours, we take several long slabbing trails in and out of side valleys, gaining altitude steadily until we hit 3700 meters. The trail is wide – probably to accommodate herds of goats and horses – but the dropoff is steep. Sidetrails lead to heart-stopping suspended footbridges.﻿﻿﻿﻿

We are suffering a little from altitude – on the uphill slopes, breathing itself feels like a chore. We’re stronger on this third day, but that doesn’t make the uphill sections easy.

Arriving at last in Ghiling, an hour past our original destination, we admire the monastery and hear that the monks are celebrating Buddha’s birthday. We head up.

In the main room of the temple, six or seven monks sit in two facing rows perhaps eight feet apart. A long thin table stands before each row of monks. Some of the monks are young boys of perhaps twelve; others are mature men. One of the younger monks is reading a bit hesitantly from a piece of paper that has been folded so often it is coming apart in his hands. When he finishes, all the monks begin chanting. A worshipper makes the rounds, bowing to each monk and putting a few bills on a light scarf resting in front of the monk. The monk folds the scarf over the money and resumes chanting, throwing what look like small seeds in the air and ringing a bell at frequent intervals. The chanting reaches a climax with a sudden burst of drumming and horn playing – loud and dissonant to my ears. Then the chanting resumes.

A monk gives me a flashlight so I can see the pictures on each wall. They seem a weird mix of Buddhist and Hindu representations, very bright and well-executed. And well-preserved, if the inscription – 1797 – can be relied upon.

Tonight’s lodging is the most basic yet and the weather is colder, but we have beds and warm blankets. The toilet, however, does not bear further description.

Wednesday, May 18

We can hear the monks chanting as we get up, followed by children's voices. Apparently, the whole village begins its day at the gompa.

We begin ours with a soul-destroying haul out of the valley, past the villagers watering their horses and tending to their herd. It’s only a 300 meter climb, but the altitude requires a self-conscious deep breathing rhythm if I don’t want to stop every 20 steps. I may finally have to admit that Gordon can now out-hike me. He is keeping up with our guide while I consistently lag back a few yards or more.

When we get to the top we’re just over 4000 meters. We descend rapidly to Ghemi, where we have an early lunch. The scenery is beginning to change, opening out into big dry hills, a bit more watered than New Mexico or Utah but with the same broad vistas of a rolling country mixed with eroded sandstone in vivid yellow and orange.

As always in a country of irrigated oases, the last mile or two to the next village is downhill. We’ve got some toys and books for the school in this town, called Tsarang. We don’t know much more about it than the name of the headmaster, and at first our guide reports that it’s closed. But the tearoom proprietor recognizes the name and remembers Liesl Clark and her two kids. She calls the headmaster, Mr. Bista, and he shows us to the school.

Many of the teachers are nuns, or anis, and the students can become monks or nuns if they have a calling, says the headmaster. The Ani School, as it’s called is far more basic than the school in Kagbeni. The kitchen is a simple stove and a few pots. Classrooms have nothing but blackboards and benches for sitting and for writing. The school does have an impressive solar electrical system but no way to store power, so anything requiring electricity needs to be done while the sun shines. The school also has one pretty new desktop computer (though a laptop would have been better given the power setup); the headmaster confessed that he knew nothing of the computer or what software it runs.

In contrast to the extremely basic facilities elsewhere, the library is spectacular – a big room with floor to ceiling bookshelves filled with Tibetan, Napal, and English works. Many US elementary schools have no better.

We hand over our maps and books, and I set to work on an enormous inflatable globe donated by a partner who asked only for photos of me blowing the damn thing up at altitude. An odd mix of generosity and cruelty, I thought, but he’ll get his photo.

The kids descend on the toys, paying special attention to a toy I had my doubts about – a felt house with felt furnishings that can be stuck to the house – felt chairs, felt tables, plus toilets, cats, dogs, bathtubs, clothes for the Mother and Father, and on and on, a cornucopia of felt goods that look grotesquely excessive in this simple school.

Many of the items are clearly not familiar household items in Tsarang. (I doubt most of these kids have used a sit-down toilet in their lives.) But the teacher uses the toy as a horizon-broadening device, describing each item as she helps the kids place it in the felt home. Mostly this works. But her explanation for the bubble-bath foam that goes with the bathtub is greeted with a mix of merriment and disbelief.

Thursday, May 19

Hard beds make for a bad night. On the whole, the room beds have been fine – narrow cots with a very firm foam mattress. More disturbing is the lack of sheets and pillowcases. The pillows (also very firm, bordering on unyielding) have permanent looking cases covered with embroidered designs – too fancy to change every day or even every week. Ditto for the blankets. As I lay awake last night listening to an indefatigable barking dog, just the barest hint in the air left me convinced that some traveler has thrown up on my blanket -- and that washing it in cold water wasn’t quite good enough.

Today’s hike is a sprint to Lo Manthang. We mostly follow the new Chinese road, which climbs steadily without the steepness of a footpath.

We walk for a time with a European aid official. The official was pleasant and clearly loved Nepal. But the official reminded me again that our aid programs have a kind of moral vanity at their heart, as rich nations pay poor ones to do things we wish we were doing. This official bemoaned the Chinese road, not just as hegemony (“The Chinese are imposing their goods on Mustang”), but for the change it will surely bring (‘they insist on making the same mistakes as us”).

I, too, will be sad when the road breaks through the last few kilometers to Chelle, and goods and people begin moving swiftly throughout Mustang. When that happens, hiking from in Mustang will become a choice, a form of recreation, and not simply the only way to see the country. Plus, the traffic will make the trip nasty and dangerous for walkers.

But I know that is simply an aesthetic preference, and one that it would shameful to impose on people who measure their net worth in cords of firewood. What kind of aid program, I wondered, do you get from countries whose officials believe that roads are a “mistake” for less developed countries? Apparently a lot of very well engineered footbridges, to hear what this official was proudest of. Maybe suspension footbridges are a good idea, but there is a whiff of patronization in such a gift: “We'll help you walk, but don't ask us to help you drive!”

Four hours of concentrated hiking brings us at last to Lo Manthang. This walled city was once the seat of an independent kingdom. The king and the kingdom were Tibetan in culture, but they also had close ties to Nepal. The Loba, or Lo people, spent several centuries exploiting the low pass that leads to Tibet, trading salt from India for crops and animals from the Tibetan plateau. The ruling dynasty has been a dependency of Nepal for a century or more. The current raja of Lo retained some autonomy until the 1990s, when he accepted the rank of Colonel in Nepal’s army in exchange for more complete integration into Nepal’s government. Then, in 2008, when Nepal's royal family abdicated and Maoists joined Nepal’s government, the last vestiges of the Kingdom of Lo were also abolished. The raja, born in 1933, still lives in Lo Manthang and mediates local disputes, but he has no formal authority.

The raja met with the first few visitors allowed into Manthang in the 1990s, and their accounts of the meetings are quite charming. We discover that the raja still grants audiences to trekkers. It is necessary to buy an admission ticket for the palace, a great hulk in the center of town, and to bring a traditional scarf or prayer flag.

And one more thing, says our guide. It would be good to bring him a present.

Hmm. This is complicated. I am not carrying a lot of extra gear suitable for a gift.

“Would he like a toy?” I ask.

Not likely, I'm told. But a bottle of whiskey would not be amiss. Perhaps that’s when doubts about this audience began to creep in.

But still. I’ve never been received by royalty before. This could be exciting. I dust off the talent for pleasant chats with foreign officials that I once had to draw on every week while in government. Will he speak English, I wonder, or will we have to wait for translation? What is the proper protocol for introducing Gordon, for entering the audience room? What about photographs? I have no protocol officer to advise me; I'm going to have to improvise. And then there’s my clothes. It’s too cold to wear anything less, but I’m pretty sure that dusty boots and a watch cap aren’t the usual attire for royal audiences in other parts of the world.

Meanwhile, we have time to explore the city. The walls are impressive – twenty feet high, with watchtowers that are even higher. And they would have to be, becau se apart from a steepish hillside below one wall, Lo Manthang has no natural defenses to work with – no cliffs, riverbanks and the like. There’s a river at the foot of the hillside – or at least a creek, because without irrigation there would be no agriculture and no city in this vast dry land. A tiny tributary runs right into the city, but there’s little room for agriculture within the walls. Instead, Lo Manthang is a warren of high homes in the traditional layout – animals on the ground floor, living quarters above, and a flat roof for working in the sun.

Temples are everywhere, along with monks, who support a large monastery here. Outside the palace, there's a square where people congregate to watch the tourists, to spin prayer wheels, and to chat. This is where the residents will hold the Tiji festival in a couple of weeks.

A light rain is falling, but it cannot drive the villagers away. As in many other parts of Mustang, the heart of social life here is the public faucet, where women gather to wash pots, clothes and themselves. Everyone is friendly, and only a few are importunately selling souvenirs. Walking the alleys of Lo Manthang, I understand the spell that Nepal casts on Westerners. Almost all of the residents are dignified and friendly. There’s isn't the whiff of predation that often taints encounters with the locals in poor countries. Even the salesmen take no for an answer. And, after two toy distribution sessions, what impresses me most about the c hildren is their discipline and cooperation. Not one child has grabbed a toy to play with alone. They take great care to handle the new toys cautiously and to share them with others.

Our guide enters the room. “Quickly please!” he says. “The raja will see you now.”

We assemble in front of the palace and a young woman gestures us up the stairs. It's the biggest building in Lo Manthang, but it doesn’t look much like a palace. What it does look like is a major reconstruction project that was halted halfway through, with piles of dirt and abandoned planks lying about in lightless gloom. The stairs are bare planks, rising like a ladder laid against a house. You really need a handrail. There is one, but it's simply a rounded strip of wood nailed to the stairs themselves. Surprisingly, that works fine, because the stairs rise so steeply that two or three steps bring the handrail to waist level. We climb two levels in the gloom. It's a five-story palace, and it occur

s to me that perhaps the bottom two floors have been reserved for livestock, following a traditional Tibetan layout.

Sure enough, after climbing through the dark, we at last come to a living area, where an open atrium lets in light from the roof. We head up a third set of stairs. I’ve just seen a few people walk down these steps; they bent an inch or more when stepped on, so I try to stay close to the handrail.

Assembling at the top of the stairs, we are at last given a quick protocol lesson. Hold your scarf draped over both hands, and extend them to the king when you are presented. He will put it over your head, we’re instructed.

We enter the audience room. It has a dusty charm – good rugs, plenty of wooden furniture, and many pictures and other decorations on the wall. I approach the king. He is an old man seated on a comfortable bench.

Best of all, he’s wearing a watch cap and dusty boots.

We line up, scarves are placed over our heads, and we sit for a cup of tea. I put my bottle of whiskey on a table beside the king. He beams at me.

We sit, silent. The king occasionally looks over at us, but he obviously feels no need to make small talk. OK, I think, time to call on my rusty diplomatic chit-chat.

I open with praise for Mustang. It is translated. He gives me another smile. I introduce Gordon. Another smile, but less wattage. It’s becoming clear that small talk from visitors is not especially welcome. Instead, we’re told that when we’re finished our tea, we can kneel beside the king for a photo. We chug our tea and kneel for photos. The audience is over.

We make our way down the rickety stairs. The handrails are more necessary but less visible on the way down. We must go slowly, feeling for each step. When we get to the construction zone, my suspicions about livestock are confirmed. From the shadows, a mastiff begins barking. He’s savage, and determined to get at the intruders. Holes in the palace wall provide just enough light to see him in profile, straining against a chain and kicking up dust as he lunges at us. Taking the steep steps slowly and carefully becomes less of a priority. Half walking, half sliding, we burst through the palace door and tumble into the street.

Friday, May 20

Today and tomorrow, instead of moving on, we will make Lo Manthang our base for day trips. Today we rent a horse to get to Choser, a small village about an hour or two from town and the site of the third and last school where we’re dropping off books and toys.

It's an Asian mountain horse – a pony, really. I could walk alongside him with my arm slung companionably over his back. Horses in Mustang are guided largely by the grunts and whistles and shushes of their herdsmen. They're mainly used as pack animals, and using verbal cues lets a single herdsman guide the whole pack train from behind on the mountain trails.

Leaving the walled city, we move through dust as fine as talc. It rises in great clouds as we walk. The villages all have a rhythm. In the morning as we’re leaving, herdsmen are dr

iving their livestock out of the village and up to the hills where there is a bit of grass. Bells on cows and horses ring as they pass. Herds of goats also move toward the hills, the kids jumping on every wall they pass through the villages, dancing with enthusiasm.

One reason this region was closed to foreigners until the 1990s was its role as a center of armed resistance when China invaded Tibet. Not all Tibetans met the invaders with spirituality and passive resistance. The Khampas were a Tibetan tribe that fought back. Famous and feared as warriors, they wore their hair long and fought China for decades after the 1950 invasion, raiding from refuges across the border in Nepal. Mustang was one of their principal staging areas because it had such a low pass into Tibet. I discover that the CIA supported the Khampa warriors, even flying some to Colorado for advanced training. CIA support for the insurgents gradually diminished, ending for good in the early 1970s. Not much later, the Nepalese government, likely under heavy pressure from China, forced the Khampas to disarm.

After that experience, it is no surprise that the Chinese have built a road across their border and into the heart of Mustang. They want to be sure that they can respond in force if guerrilla war ever returns to the region. Meanwhile the road makes it easy for Chinese officials to visit Lo Manthang. As we hike along the road, a convoy of late-model SUVs suddenly rounds the turn and heads toward us at high speed. We scramble out of the way as the cars, two white and two black, splash through a stream and past us.

The Nepalese tell me not to get too close to the Mustang-Tibet border. “Local people can cross there. They’re known,” says one, “but if we Nepalese go there, maybe they’ll arrest us, torture us. We don’t know.”

The third school is a public boarding school for the district. It serves 120 students. Students spend 8 months of the year in Choser, but in winter the whole school transfers to Pokhara; it’s just too cold to stay in Mustang.

The Chinese government, evidently on a charm offensive here, has paid for the construction of a science lab that’s still being completed. It contains a large multipurpose room with twenty Compaq laptops running Windows 7. The school also boasts a large array of solar power panels to power the place. The library, though, is the least impressive we’ve seen.

We end the afternoon with a visit to caves built into local cliffs. Window holes poked through the rock wall expand into interlocking rooms that extend deep into the cliff. The rooms rise five stories high, one level linked to the next by crude ladders or carved foot-holds. Moving from one room to another sometimes means jumping over holes that lead to the level below. The ceilings are stained shiny black with soot from 2500 years of fires.

This is where local villagers used to hide out when raiding parties from Tibet or Nepal rode through the valley. The only problem was that if the raiders settled down for a siege, they could cut off the defenders' water. Once, the story goes, besieged cavedwellers had almost run out of water; desperate, some of them poured mustard oil over their heads and leaned out of the windows, dripping wet, to mock the invaders. Convinced that the villagers had plenty of water and that the siege had failed, the raiders moved on.

Today, the villagers are building an irrigation terrace at the foot of the caves. Everything must be done by hand. Men and women use picks to pull earth from the uphill side of the terrace. They shovel the loose earth onto stiff, flattened animal hides; other women drag the hides across the terrace and dump it on the downhill slope, extending the terrace by perhaps an inch or two. I think that they’ve probably been using the same techniques for the last 2500 years.

Saturday, May 21

After breakfast, we head up the valley, me riding, Gordon walking. We’re making for a gompa on a hill a few miles to the north. When we arrive, the gompa is locked. It looks down at heels, and finding the custodian takes so long that we nearly leave. When he does come panting up the trail from the village, though, the custodian proves to be a young, chatty fellow who is full of information. Not himself a monk, he nonetheless provides a detailed tour of the gompa's ceremonial hall. It has extensive murals, a wall of religious texts in special containers, and a host of musical instruments. In winter, he says, every village family but one heads for lower and warmer ground, along with most of the monks. He stayed this winter, enduring waist-high snows and bitter cold, shoveling snow off the gompa roof so no water could seep in to wreck the murals. It occurs to me that someone must have done this every winter for centuries to preserve the murals he's just shown me.

If you have to stay the winter, he says, it's better not to be a monk. The villagers who stay can eat their animals to keep up their strength. The monks are vegetarians, and vegetables aren’t easy to find in Mustang in winter. But the monks who stay through the winter have to live on potatoes they've buried in the dirt during the summer. True, they have a greenhouse to speed the arrival of summer vegetables, but it's late May now, and there are no new crops; the monks are still digging up last year's potatoes.

He takes us outside and points at the border with China – a series of low hills no different from those we’ve crossed many times already. No wonder the traders -- and the Khampas – were fond of Mustang. And no wonder the Chinese are working so hard to extend their influence here. The custodian tells us that the Chinese distributed food to all the villagers this winter. Despite the largess, he remains skeptical of their motives. Nepal has no troops on the border, he notes, while China has many. Nepalese crossing into China need to get permission for every trip, he adds, but Chinese officials cross the border at will, with no permission that he’s aware of. He confirms that the caravan we saw yesterday was Chinese.

In a nearby village a home is under construction. All of the houses we encounter seem to be built in the same general way. Even the modern materials incorporated into the houses follow a traditional pattern.

By far the most common building materials are sundried mud bricks, perhaps one foot long and six inches square. They can’t be kiln-dried because firewood is too scarce. So vacant fields are regularly filled with rows of bricks curing in the sun. They look like post-modern war memorials.

What wood is available is used mainly to frame doors and windows and to construct the higher floors. In the first floor, it looks as though stones surmounted by mud bricks make up the walls, although mud seems like a dubious load bearer.

For higher floors, poles are set in the ground to support large rafter-type horizontal poles. Across these main rafters are laid a series of lesser poles at two-foot intervals. These are then spanned by one-or-two-inch wooden strips. Atop the strips is hay impregnated with mud. At the end of the day, the houses are sticks and mud, and I realize that, without careful upkeep, all of this -- walls, buildings, whole gompas -- will melt back into the landscape. In fact, many of the hilltops carry ruins that are halfway through the transition from buildings to eroded mounds of dirt.

Monday May 23

Four hours of hard hiking with few stops takes us to Shyangmochen. We are back on the same trail we took on the way in, and we’re staying in the tearoom where we had lunch on our way to Gheling.

It seems a lot softer and more civilized on the way out than it did when we stopped for lunch so many days ago It has a hot water shower that actually gets above tepid (though the air temperature makes it a challenge not to lose all the warmth of the shower and then some while drying and dressing.) The lunch table is set up directly beneath a traditional Mustang skylight. There are electric lights and even a couple of power outlets. The beds and pillows have sheets and pillow cases. Really, it’s practically the Ritz.

Perhaps energized by the slightly lower altitude and the half day of hiking, I decide it’s time to wash a bunch of clothes. The village’s washing is done at the community tap, fed in an endless stream that flows out of the irrigation system. And back into it, for that matter, since any water that flows from the tap is recaptured for the crops downhill.

I share the tap with several women who are obviously better at this than I. They bring big metal bowls that they fill with soap, clothes, and water, working up an impressive lather while I’m rubbing a bit of hand soap into my clothes, one sock at a time. It doesn’t take long for me to learn what seems to be a universal female phrase for, “If you’re done messing about in a typically useless male way, would you reconnect the hose so we can get about our business?” I also learn not to stand about downwind of the tap when they’re vigorously rinsing.

The best part of doing the wash is the drying. The afternoon wind is again hitting 50 mph and the sun is out. I hang the wet clothes on a metal wire clothesline. It’s very satisfying when hiking to have reasonable confidence that in the morning your clothes will be not just cleanish but that you won’t be putting them on wet, which tends to take the joy out of clean clothes.

Tuesday, May 24

Today we are retracing our original path, making the long descent to Chelle, the last of the “Tibetan” villages along the trail.

We pass the same road construction machinery that blocked our path on the way up. The road builders have made visible progress since we passed this way last week. I have new appreciation for the difficulties the road builders will face. Finding a way for cars and trucks to navigate those grueling staircases won’t be easy. But with enough blasting powder, the road will get through, even if flash floods and rockfalls occasionally cut the road during wet seasons. And that will make an enormous difference in Mustang’s culture. We were privileged to see it before the trucks start grinding through the villages, bringing cheap beer, wifi hotspots, and HIV.

Back in Chelle, the teahouse that we had to ourselves last week is now packed. More than a dozen French trekkers are using the adjacent campground and enlivening the common rooms. Germans, New Zealanders, and others have taken over the remaining rooms. They are all bound for the Tiji festival in Lo Manthang.

All day on this leg we’ve met party after party hustling toward Lo Manthang for the same reason. I’m sorry we missed the festival, but in the end I suspect it’s a bit like our audience with the king – a maguffin, more exciting in prospect than in reality. And it turns out that by missing the festival we earned a bonus -- walking to Lo Manthang alone, scarcely seeing one foreigner a day, even after we stopped for the night. These trekkers will never be alone. They’ll be passing and repassing each other every day, queuing with each other outside the latrines, and straining Lo Manthang to the bursting point when they arrive.

To our eyes, the mass of festival trekkers on this leg looks like a freak – completely out of proportion to normal travel levels before or after the Tiji crowd. The Tiji bulge resembles a pig making its way through a python, or a baby boom making its way through a nation’s demography. But the Tiji trekkers, like the boomers, won’t see it that way. The crowds and the queues will be their normal, never changing as they move up the valley. They won’t realize how rare it was to meet other hikers on the trail just a few days on either side of the trek they took.

We’ve been looking for a chance to play carom, a game that we’ve seen porters playing all along the trail. Carom resembles pool, if pool were played with poker chips on a table about 3 feet square, with a raised lip and a hole in each corner. In the middle of the table are eleven poker chips. Each player has an outsized chip that he flicks at the other chips. The object is to be the first to drop your 5 chips and then the “queen” into the corner holes. A crack pool player, Gordon has deduced the rules.

Now we’ve found a carom joint that is willing to let us try our hand. When the raucous Nepali game ends, a few observers linger to watch the Westerners make a hash of their game. Accurately flicking a chip at a target turns out to be remarkably difficult. By luck, I get one chip almost on the lip of a hole across the table from me. Then I waste ten turns just trying to hit the damn thing, and when I do, it moves further from the hole. Gordon is better, but only at the theory. He understands the angles and possibilities better than I do, but his execution is just as bad. We battle to a tie, with each having a single chip, plus the crucial red queen, on the board. By then, all observers have drifted away in disgust, unable to extract even comic relief from our efforts. At that point it was safe for me to let Gordon win. That’s my story, anyway, and nothing will shake it; there were no witnesses.

Wednesday, May 25

We are leaving the last of Tibet behind today, descending from Chelle to the floor of the Kali Gandaki. To extract the maximum up-country time from our territory permit, we’ve left ourselves a single day to get to Kagbeni from Chelle – a hike that took two days on the way in.

It is a demanding day, in part because our guide wants to get as much hiking in before noon, when the winds will surely be raging up the river valley. So we plough on with only a couple of occasional five-minute stops at the top of steep climbs. The good news is that I can feel the altitude change. My legs get as tired as ever, but the sense that every step requires a special breathing rhythm is gone. Even on the steepest uphills, running out of breath is rare. Other symptoms, such as a hacking cough, also recede as we drop below 3000 meters for the first time in a week.

The Kali Gandaki remains as remarkable as ever. The valley floor is so flat and barren that it looks almost like a reservoir of stones -- as though a dam had been constructed downstream and the gravel and rocks had somehow floated to the top. This is more or less what environmentalists tell us will eventually happen to Lake Powell and other big hydropower lakes; they’ll fill with debris. I’m sure that they’re right to tell us how terrible that will be, but if the floor of the Kali Gandaki is any guide, it will also produce some dramatic landscapes.

Toward the end of the day, we drop to the floor of the Kali Gandaki. It is not as flat as it looks from a distance. Rocks slip under our feet with each step, and old channels, now dry, make the footing unpredictable. Worse, the bridge we used to cross the river has washed away. We have a choice – wade or climb back to the road running high along the valley wall,

By now, I’m damned if we’ll climb these cliffs one more time. The water is swift but not deep, perhaps a bit above our knees. With poles, that’s usually safe, though pushing things if the current is very strong.

The standard Western stream crossing technique is to take your socks off, put your shoes back on, cross the river, pour out the water, put on the socks, and walk in damp but not squelching-wet footgear for a few hours. Wearing shoes helps a bit with the shocking cold of mountain streams and a lot with the treacherous footing of the streambed. Braced against the stream with a strongly planted upstream pole and an insurance pole downstream, this technique has gotten us across some tough streams, including a memorable encounter with the Upper Yellowstone in thigh-high flood.

But the Nepali guides have a different idea. They want to cross barefoot. So we too tie our shoelaces together, drape them around our necks and start across barefoot. I can feel the rocks underfoot – a mixed blessing, but good for stability. What I haven’t counted on is the way being barefoot changes the enthusiasm with which you drive your upstream pole into the river, knowing that the current will inevitably drag the point back downstream a foot or more before it hits the gravel. At least you hope it hits gravel.

When we get to Kagbeni, feet unpunctured, the Tiji festival boom is over. No one in the inn is going to Lo Manthang. Kagbeni is also on the month-long Annapurna Circuit trail, and the inn is full of guests doing some portion of tha trek. There’s a large group of mature Japanese women and men, plus a gaggle of 20-something backpackers – Germans and Russians, mainly – who’ve hooked up by chance during their last few days of the Annapurna circuit. They spend much of the evening arguing about whether to walk or take the bus next day to Jomsom, and how far to go beyond Jomsom. They finally agree to walk to Jomsom, starting at 6 a.m. One Russian boisterously puts forward first one proposal then another. He seems oblivious to the group dynamic. Sooner or later, someone needs to tell him to stop throwing out disruptive new options and to get with the program. If this is what the Russian Duma is like, I think, it’s easy to see why so many Russians voted for Putin.

This gaggle of Europeans seems as isolated from Nepal as any packaged-tour group staying at the local Hilton. A tour group may remember Kathmandu as the place with the terrible breakfast buffet, while the Europeans remember it as the place where they met a bombshell German babe, but either way, the trip is more about them than about Nepal. Maybe that’s true for all of us.

What I find interesting is that this group isn’t full of gap-year college kids. These trekkers have finished school. Many have dropped out of professional-track jobs. Some expect to pick up a new job in a few months, others lost jobs in the 2008-09 recession and are waiting for better times. But Nepal isn’t that cheap. Just to eat, sleep and indulge in the occasional beer or a bus, those backpackers must be spending $10 a day, plus airfare in the thousands of dollars. I’m not sure how many college students in the West can get their parents to underwrite the cost of a month on the Annapurna Circuit, so the trek is left to a slightly more affluent crowd. I suppose it’s no surprise that even backpacking has gone upscale as global economies converge.

Next morning, the Euro gaggle ends up leaving a little before we do, around 7. They move, like a convoy, at the speed of the slowest ship. We pass them in the first hour and soon are able to drop our packs at the Jomsom airport hotel and keep going. We’ve decided to take a day trip down the valley to a town called Marpha, also on the Annapurna circuit.

Marpha is a big change from the country we’ve been trekking through. On the way, we pass the first bit of greenery we’ve seen all trip that isn’t walled up like Ft. Knox. It’s a simple, close cropped patch of lawn that no doubt serves a pasture for the occasional horse, but unlike Mustang, the landowners aren’t consumed by fear that someone else’s goat might sneak an illicit bite. Indeed, even the walls around gardens here are lower, more symbolic and casual than in Mustang; water is clearly more abundant here.

Marpha itself is a lovely town full of white-washed stone homes with dark red frames around doors and windows. Marpha is proud of its apples, and it should be. We have an apple pie for lunch – a cinnamon flavored core of chopped apple surrounded by a flaky, deep-fried crust. I buy some yak cheese to go with it, despite anxiety about eating uncooked food. But we’ve spent the trip worrying about how to sterilize anything that passes our lips, and so far we’ve been fine. Maybe the economic convergence that makes backpacking more expensive is also slowly reducing the risk of bad water even in countries as poor as Nepal.

We head back along the road. It is a taste of what Mustang trekkers will soon experience. We can go twenty minutes with no traffic, but we can never ignore the risk that a truck or bus will come barreling around a turn. They take up so much of the road that you always have to have to be ready to jump for the side of the road if a horn sounds behind you. Even the motorcycles expect you to move if you’re in the same rut they’ve chosen. The Annapurna circuit is quickly replacing trail with dirt road, and I mentally cross it off our list of likely future hikes.

We end our hike at the airport hotel. It’s not fancy, but it does let us take our first hot shower in ten days. What a heavenly way to end our trek.

Aug 24, 2011

We are leaving the last of Tibet behind today, descending from Chelle to the floor of the Kali Gandaki. To extract the maximum up-country time from our territory permit, we’ve left ourselves a single day to get to Kagbeni from Chelle – a hike that took two days on the way in.

It is a demanding day, in part because our guide wants to get as much hiking in before noon, when the winds will surely be raging up the river valley. So we plough on with only a couple of occasional five-minute stops at the top of steep climbs. The good news is that I can feel the altitude change. My legs get as tired as ever, but the sense that every step requires a special breathing rhythm is gone. Even on the steepest uphills, running out of breath is rare. Other symptoms, such as a hacking cough, also recede as we drop below 3000 meters for the first time in a week.

The Kali Gandaki remains as remarkable as ever. The valley floor is so flat and barren that it looks almost like a reservoir of stones -- as though a dam had been constructed downstream and the gravel and rocks had somehow floated to the top. This is more or less what environmentalists tell us will eventually happen to Lake Powell and other big hydropower lakes; they’ll fill with debris. I’m sure that they’re right to tell us how terrible that will be, but if the floor of the Kali Gandaki is any guide, it will also produce some dramatic landscapes.

Toward the end of the day, we drop to the floor of the Kali Gandaki. It is not as flat as it looks from a distance. Rocks slip under our feet with each step, and old channels, now dry, make the footing unpredictable. Worse, the bridge we used to cross the river has washed away. We have a choice – wade or climb back to the road running high along the valley wall,

By now, I’m damned if we’ll climb these cliffs one more time. The water is swift but not deep, perhaps a bit above our knees. With poles, that’s usually safe, though pushing things if the current is very strong.

The standard Western stream crossing technique is to take your socks off, put your shoes back on, cross the river, pour out the water, put on the socks, and walk in damp but not squelching-wet footgear for a few hours. Wearing shoes helps a bit with the shocking cold of mountain streams and a lot with the treacherous footing of the streambed. Braced against the stream with a strongly planted upstream pole and an insurance pole downstream, this technique has gotten us across some tough streams, including a memorable encounter with the Upper Yellowstone in thigh-high flood.

But the Nepali guides have a different idea. They want to cross barefoot. So we too tie our shoelaces together, drape them around our necks and start across barefoot. I can feel the rocks underfoot – a mixed blessing, but good for stability. What I haven’t counted on is the way being barefoot changes the enthusiasm with which you drive your upstream pole into the river, knowing that the current will inevitably drag the point back downstream a foot or more before it hits the gravel. At least you hope it hits gravel.

When we get to Kagbeni, feet unpunctured, the Tiji festival boom is over. No one in the inn is going to Lo Manthang. Kagbeni is also on the month-long Annapurna Circuit trail, and the inn is full of guests doing some portion of tha trek. There’s a large group of mature Japanese women and men, plus a gaggle of 20-something backpackers – Germans and Russians, mainly – who’ve hooked up by chance during their last few days of the Annapurna circuit. They spend much of the evening arguing about whether to walk or take the bus next day to Jomsom, and how far to go beyond Jomsom. They finally agree to walk to Jomsom, starting at 6 a.m. One Russian boisterously puts forward first one proposal then another. He seems oblivious to the group dynamic. Sooner or later, someone needs to tell him to stop throwing out disruptive new options and to get with the program. If this is what the Russian Duma is like, I think, it’s easy to see why so many Russians voted for Putin.

This gaggle of Europeans seems as isolated from Nepal as any packaged-tour group staying at the local Hilton. A tour group may remember Kathmandu as the place with the terrible breakfast buffet, while the Europeans remember it as the place where they met a bombshell German babe, but either way, the trip is more about them than about Nepal. Maybe that’s true for all of us.

What I find interesting is that this group isn’t full of gap-year college kids. These trekkers have finished school. Many have dropped out of professional-track jobs. Some expect to pick up a new job in a few months, others lost jobs in the 2008-09 recession and are waiting for better times. But Nepal isn’t that cheap. Just to eat, sleep and indulge in the occasional beer or a bus, those backpackers must be spending $10 a day, plus airfare in the thousands of dollars. I’m not sure how many college students in the West can get their parents to underwrite the cost of a month on the Annapurna Circuit, so the trek is left to a slightly more affluent crowd. I suppose it’s no surprise that even backpacking has gone upscale as global economies converge.

Next morning, the Euro gaggle ends up leaving a little before we do, around 7. They move, like a convoy, at the speed of the slowest ship. We pass them in the first hour and soon are able to drop our packs at the Jomsom airport hotel and keep going. We’ve decided to take a day trip down the valley to a town called Marpha, also on the Annapurna circuit.

Marpha is a big change from the country we’ve been trekking through. On the way, we pass the first bit of greenery we’ve seen all trip that isn’t walled up like Ft. Knox. It’s a simple, close cropped patch of lawn that no doubt serves a pasture for the occasional horse, but unlike Mustang, the landowners aren’t consumed by fear that someone else’s goat might sneak an illicit bite. Indeed, even the walls around gardens here are lower, more symbolic and casual than in Mustang; water is clearly more abundant here.

Marpha itself is a lovely town full of white-washed stone homes with dark red frames around doors and windows. Marpha is proud of its apples, and it should be. We have an apple pie for lunch – a cinnamon flavored core of chopped apple surrounded by a flaky, deep-fried crust. I buy some yak cheese to go with it, despite anxiety about eating uncooked food. But we’ve spent the trip worrying about how to sterilize anything that passes our lips, and so far we’ve been fine. Maybe the economic convergence that makes backpacking more expensive is also slowly reducing the risk of bad water even in countries as poor as Nepal.

We head back along the road. It is a taste of what Mustang trekkers will soon experience. We can go twenty minutes with no traffic, but we can never ignore the risk that a truck or bus will come barreling around a turn. They take up so much of the road that you always have to have to be ready to jump for the side of the road if a horn sounds behind you. Even the motorcycles expect you to move if you’re in the same rut they’ve chosen. The Annapurna circuit is quickly replacing trail with dirt road, and I mentally cross it off our list of likely future hikes.

We end our hike at the airport hotel. It’s not fancy, but it does let us take our first hot shower in ten days. What a heavenly way to end our trek.

Aug 21, 2011

Four hours of hard hiking with few stops takes us to Shyangmochen. We are back on the same trail we took on the way in, and we’re staying in the tearoom where we had lunch on our way to Gheling.

It seems a lot softer and more civilized on the way out than it did when we stopped for lunch so many days ago It has a hot water shower that actually gets above tepid (though the air temperature makes it a challenge not to lose all the warmth of the shower and then some while drying and dressing.) The lunch table is set up directly beneath a traditional Mustang skylight. There are electric lights and even a couple of power outlets. The beds and pillows have sheets and pillow cases. Really, it’s practically the Ritz.

Perhaps energized by the slightly lower altitude and the half day of hiking, I decide it’s time to wash a bunch of clothes. The village’s washing is done at the community tap, fed in an endless stream that flows out of the irrigation system. And back into it, for that matter, since any water that flows from the tap is recaptured for the crops downhill.

I share the tap with several women who are obviously better at this than I. They bring big metal bowls that they fill with soap, clothes, and water, working up an impressive lather while I’m rubbing a bit of hand soap into my clothes, one sock at a time. It doesn’t take long for me to learn what seems to be a universal female phrase for, “If you’re done messing about in a typically useless male way, would you reconnect the hose so we can get about our business?” I also learn not to stand about downwind of the tap when they’re vigorously rinsing.

The best part of doing the wash is the drying. The afternoon wind is again hitting 50 mph and the sun is out. I hang the wet clothes on a metal wire clothesline. It’s very satisfying when hiking to have reasonable confidence that in the morning your clothes will be not just cleanish but that you won’t be putting them on wet, which tends to take the joy out of clean clothes.

Aug 20, 2011

Today we are retracing our original path, making the long descent to Chelle, the last of the “Tibetan” villages along the trail.

We pass the same road construction machinery that blocked our path on the way up. The road builders have made visible progress since we passed this way last week. I have new appreciation for the difficulties the road builders will face. Finding a way for cars and trucks to navigate those grueling staircases won’t be easy. But with enough blasting powder, the road will get through, even if flash floods and rockfalls occasionally cut the road during wet seasons. And that will make an enormous difference in Mustang’s culture. We were privileged to see it before the trucks start grinding through the villages, bringing cheap beer, wifi hotspots, and HIV.

Back in Chelle, the teahouse that we had to ourselves last week is now packed. More than a dozen French trekkers are using the adjacent campground and enlivening the common rooms. Germans, New Zealanders, and others have taken over the remaining rooms. They are all bound for the Tiji festival in Lo Manthang.

All day on this leg we’ve met party after party hustling toward Lo Manthang for the same reason. I’m sorry we missed the festival, but in the end I suspect it’s a bit like our audience with the king – a maguffin, more exciting in prospect than in reality. And it turns out that by missing the festival we earned a bonus -- walking to Lo Manthang alone, scarcely seeing one foreigner a day, even after we stopped for the night. These trekkers will never be alone. They’ll be passing and repassing each other every day, queuing with each other outside the latrines, and straining Lo Manthang to the bursting point when they arrive.

To our eyes, the mass of festival trekkers on this leg looks like a freak – completely out of proportion to normal travel levels before or after the Tiji crowd. The Tiji bulge resembles a pig making its way through a python, or a baby boom making its way through a nation’s demography. But the Tiji trekkers, like the boomers, won’t see it that way. The crowds and the queues will be their normal, never changing as they move up the valley. They won’t realize how rare it was to meet other hikers on the trail just a few days on either side of the trek they took.

We’ve been looking for a chance to play carom, a game that we’ve seen porters playing all along the trail. Carom resembles pool, if pool were played with poker chips on a table about 3 feet square, with a raised lip and a hole in each corner. In the middle of the table are eleven poker chips. Each player has an outsized chip that he flicks at the other chips. The object is to be the first to drop your 5 chips and then the “queen” into the corner holes. A crack pool player, Gordon has deduced the rules.

Now we’ve found a carom joint that is willing to let us try our hand. When the raucous Nepali game ends, a few observers linger to watch the Westerners make a hash of their game. Accurately flicking a chip at a target turns out to be remarkably difficult. By luck, I get one chip almost on the lip of a hole across the table from me. Then I waste ten turns just trying to hit the damn thing, and when I do, it moves further from the hole. Gordon is better, but only at the theory. He understands the angles and possibilities better than I do, but his execution is just as bad. We battle to a tie, with each having a single chip, plus the crucial red queen, on the board. By then, all observers have drifted away in disgust, unable to extract even comic relief from our efforts. At that point it was safe for me to let Gordon win. That’s my story, anyway, and nothing will shake it; there were no witnesses.

After breakfast, we head up the valley, me riding, Gordon walking. We’re making for a gompa on a hill a few miles to the north. When we arrive, the gompa is locked. It looks down at heels, and finding the custodian takes so long that we nearly leave. When he does come panting up the trail from the village, though, the custodian proves to be a young, chatty fellow who is full of information. Not himself a monk, he nonetheless provides a detailed tour of the gompa's ceremonial hall. It has extensive murals, a wall of religious texts in special containers, and a host of musical instruments. In winter, he says, every village family but one heads for lower and warmer ground, along with most of the monks. He stayed this winter, enduring waist-high snows and bitter cold, shoveling snow off the gompa roof so no water could seep in to wreck the murals. It occurs to me that someone must have done this every winter for centuries to preserve the murals he's just shown me.

If you have to stay the winter, he says, it's better not to be a monk. The villagers who stay can eat their animals to keep up their strength. The monks are vegetarians, and vegetables aren’t easy to find in Mustang in winter. But the monks who stay through the winter have to live on potatoes they've buried in the dirt during the summer. True, they have a greenhouse to speed the arrival of summer vegetables, but it's late May now, and there are no new crops; the monks are still digging up last year's potatoes.

He takes us outside and points at the border with China – a series of low hills no different from those we’ve crossed many times already. No wonder the traders -- and the Khampas – were fond of Mustang. And no wonder the Chinese are working so hard to extend their influence here. The custodian tells us that the Chinese distributed food to all the villagers this winter. Despite the largess, he remains skeptical of their motives. Nepal has no troops on the border, he notes, while China has many. Nepalese crossing into China need to get permission for every trip, he adds, but Chinese officials cross the border at will, with no permission that he’s aware of. He confirms that the caravan we saw yesterday was Chinese.

In a nearby village a home is under construction. All of the houses we encounter seem to be built in the same general way. Even the modern materials incorporated into the houses follow a traditional pattern.

By far the most common building materials are sundried mud bricks, perhaps one foot long and six inches square. They can’t be kiln-dried because firewood is too scarce. So vacant fields are regularly filled with rows of bricks curing in the sun. They look like post-modern war memorials.

What wood is available is used mainly to frame doors and windows and to construct the higher floors. In the first floor, it looks as though stones surmounted by mud bricks make up the walls, although mud seems like a dubious load bearer.

For higher floors, poles are set in the ground to support large rafter-type horizontal poles. Across these main rafters are laid a series of lesser poles at two-foot intervals. These are then spanned by one-or-two-inch wooden strips. Atop the strips is hay impregnated with mud. At the end of the day, the houses are sticks and mud, and I realize that, without careful upkeep, all of this -- walls, buildings, whole gompas -- will melt back into the landscape. In fact, many of the hilltops carry ruins that are halfway through the transition from buildings to eroded mounds of dirt.

Aug 18, 2011

Today and tomorrow, instead of moving on, we will make Lo Manthang our base for day trips. Today we rent a horse to get to Choser, a small village about an hour or two from town and the site of the third and last school where we’re dropping off books and toys.

It's an Asian mountain horse – a pony, really. I could walk alongside him with my arm slung companionably over his back. Horses in Mustang are guided largely by the grunts and whistles and shushes of their herdsmen. They're mainly used as pack animals, and using verbal cues lets a single herdsman guide the whole pack train from behind on the mountain trails.

Leaving the walled city, we move through dust as fine as talc. It rises in great clouds as we walk. The villages all have a rhythm. In the morning as we’re leaving, herdsmen are dr

iving their livestock out of the village and up to the hills where there is a bit of grass. Bells on cows and horses ring as they pass. Herds of goats also move toward the hills, the kids jumping on every wall they pass through the villages, dancing with enthusiasm.

One reason this region was closed to foreigners until the 1990s was its role as a center of armed resistance when China invaded Tibet. Not all Tibetans met the invaders with spirituality and passive resistance. The Khampas were a Tibetan tribe that fought back. Famous and feared as warriors, they wore their hair long and fought China for decades after the 1950 invasion, raiding from refuges across the border in Nepal. Mustang was one of their principal staging areas because it had such a low pass into Tibet. I discover that the CIA supported the Khampa warriors, even flying some to Colorado for advanced training. CIA support for the insurgents gradually diminished, ending for good in the early 1970s. Not much later, the Nepalese government, likely under heavy pressure from China, forced the Khampas to disarm.

After that experience, it is no surprise that the Chinese have built a road across their border and into the heart of Mustang. They want to be sure that they can respond in force if guerrilla war ever returns to the region. Meanwhile the road makes it easy for Chinese officials to visit Lo Manthang. As we hike along the road, a convoy of late-model SUVs suddenly rounds the turn and heads toward us at high speed. We scramble out of the way as the cars, two white and two black, splash through a stream and past us.

The Nepalese tell me not to get too close to the Mustang-Tibet border. “Local people can cross there. They’re known,” says one, “but if we Nepalese go there, maybe they’ll arrest us, torture us. We don’t know.”

The third school is a public boarding school for the district. It serves 120 students. Students spend 8 months of the year in Choser, but in winter the whole school transfers to Pokhara; it’s just too cold to stay in Mustang.

The Chinese government, evidently on a charm offensive here, has paid for the construction of a science lab that’s still being completed. It contains a large multipurpose room with twenty Compaq laptops running Windows 7. The school also boasts a large array of solar power panels to power the place. The library, though, is the least impressive we’ve seen.

We end the afternoon with a visit to caves built into local cliffs. Window holes poked through the rock wall expand into interlocking rooms that extend deep into the cliff. The rooms rise five stories high, one level linked to the next by crude ladders or carved foot-holds. Moving from one room to another sometimes means jumping over holes that lead to the level below. The ceilings are stained shiny black with soot from 2500 years of fires.

This is where local villagers used to hide out when raiding parties from Tibet or Nepal rode through the valley. The only problem was that if the raiders settled down for a siege, they could cut off the defenders' water. Once, the story goes, besieged cavedwellers had almost run out of water; desperate, some of them poured mustard oil over their heads and leaned out of the windows, dripping wet, to mock the invaders. Convinced that the villagers had plenty of water and that the siege had failed, the raiders moved on.

Today, the villagers are building an irrigation terrace at the foot of the caves. Everything must be done by hand. Men and women use picks to pull earth from the uphill side of the terrace. They shovel the loose earth onto stiff, flattened animal hides; other women drag the hides across the terrace and dump it on the downhill slope, extending the terrace by perhaps an inch or two. I think that they’ve probably been using the same techniques for the last 2500 years.

Aug 16, 2011

Hard beds make for a bad night. On the whole, the room beds have been fine – narrow cots with a very firm foam mattress. More disturbing is the lack of sheets and pillowcases. The pillows (also very firm, bordering on unyielding) have permanent looking cases covered with embroidered designs – too fancy to change every day or even every week. Ditto for the blankets. As I lay awake last night listening to an indefatigable barking dog, just the barest hint in the air left me convinced that some traveler has thrown up on my blanket -- and that washing it in cold water wasn’t quite good enough.

Today’s hike is a sprint to Lo Manthang. We mostly follow the new Chinese road, which climbs steadily without the steepness of a footpath.

We walk for a time with a European aid official. The official was pleasant and clearly loved Nepal. But the official reminded me again that our aid programs have a kind of moral vanity at their heart, as rich nations pay poor ones to do things we wish we were doing. This official bemoaned the Chinese road, not just as hegemony (“The Chinese are imposing their goods on Mustang”), but for the change it will surely bring (‘they insist on making the same mistakes as us”).

I, too, will be sad when the road breaks through the last few kilometers to Chelle, and goods and people begin moving swiftly throughout Mustang. When that happens, hiking from in Mustang will become a choice, a form of recreation, and not simply the only way to see the country. Plus, the traffic will make the trip nasty and dangerous for walkers.

But I know that is simply an aesthetic preference, and one that it would shameful to impose on people who measure their net worth in cords of firewood. What kind of aid program, I wondered, do you get from countries whose officials believe that roads are a “mistake” for less developed countries? Apparently a lot of very well engineered footbridges, to hear what this official was proudest of. Maybe suspension footbridges are a good idea, but there is a whiff of patronization in such a gift: “We'll help you walk, but don't ask us to help you drive!”

Four hours of concentrated hiking brings us at last to Lo Manthang. This walled city was once the seat of an independent kingdom. The king and the kingdom were Tibetan in culture, but they also had close ties to Nepal. The Loba, or Lo people, spent several centuries exploiting the low pass that leads to Tibet, trading salt from India for crops and animals from the Tibetan plateau. The ruling dynasty has been a dependency of Nepal for a century or more. The current raja of Lo retained some autonomy until the 1990s, when he accepted the rank of Colonel in Nepal’s army in exchange for more complete integration into Nepal’s government. Then, in 2008, when Nepal's royal family abdicated and Maoists joined Nepal’s government, the last vestiges of the Kingdom of Lo were also abolished. The raja, born in 1933, still lives in Lo Manthang and mediates local disputes, but he has no formal authority.

The raja met with the first few visitors allowed into Manthang in the 1990s, and their accounts of the meetings are quite charming. We discover that the raja still grants audiences to trekkers. It is necessary to buy an admission ticket for the palace, a great hulk in the center of town, and to bring a traditional scarf or prayer flag.

And one more thing, says our guide. It would be good to bring him a present.

Hmm. This is complicated. I am not carrying a lot of extra gear suitable for a gift.

“Would he like a toy?” I ask.

Not likely, I'm told. But a bottle of whiskey would not be amiss. Perhaps that’s when doubts about this audience began to creep in.

But still. I’ve never been received by royalty before. This could be exciting. I dust off the talent for pleasant chats with foreign officials that I once had to draw on every week while in government. Will he speak English, I wonder, or will we have to wait for translation? What is the proper protocol for introducing Gordon, for entering the audience room? What about photographs? I have no protocol officer to advise me; I'm going to have to improvise. And then there’s my clothes. It’s too cold to wear anything less, but I’m pretty sure that dusty boots and a watch cap aren’t the usual attire for royal audiences in other parts of the world.

Meanwhile, we have time to explore the city. The walls are impressive – twenty feet high, with watchtowers that are even higher. And they would have to be, becau se apart from a steepish hillside below one wall, Lo Manthang has no natural defenses to work with – no cliffs, riverbanks and the like. There’s a river at the foot of the hillside – or at least a creek, because without irrigation there would be no agriculture and no city in this vast dry land. A tiny tributary runs right into the city, but there’s little room for agriculture within the walls. Instead, Lo Manthang is a warren of high homes in the traditional layout – animals on the ground floor, living quarters above, and a flat roof for working in the sun.

Temples are everywhere, along with monks, who support a large monastery here. Outside the palace, there's a square where people congregate to watch the tourists, to spin prayer wheels, and to chat. This is where the residents will hold the Tiji festival in a couple of weeks.

A light rain is falling, but it cannot drive the villagers away. As in many other parts of Mustang, the heart of social life here is the public faucet, where women gather to wash pots, clothes and themselves. Everyone is friendly, and only a few are importunately selling souvenirs. Walking the alleys of Lo Manthang, I understand the spell that Nepal casts on Westerners. Almost all of the residents are dignified and friendly. There’s isn't the whiff of predation that often taints encounters with the locals in poor countries. Even the salesmen take no for an answer. And, after two toy distribution sessions, what impresses me most about the c hildren is their discipline and cooperation. Not one child has grabbed a toy to play with alone. They take great care to handle the new toys cautiously and to share them with others.

Our guide enters the room. “Quickly please!” he says. “The raja will see you now.”

We assemble in front of the palace and a young woman gestures us up the stairs. It's the biggest building in Lo Manthang, but it doesn’t look much like a palace. What it does look like is a major reconstruction project that was halted halfway through, with piles of dirt and abandoned planks lying about in lightless gloom. The stairs are bare planks, rising like a ladder laid against a house. You really need a handrail. There is one, but it's simply a rounded strip of wood nailed to the stairs themselves. Surprisingly, that works fine, because the stairs rise so steeply that two or three steps bring the handrail to waist level. We climb two levels in the gloom. It's a five-story palace, and it occur

s to me that perhaps the bottom two floors have been reserved for livestock, following a traditional Tibetan layout.

Sure enough, after climbing through the dark, we at last come to a living area, where an open atrium lets in light from the roof. We head up a third set of stairs. I’ve just seen a few people walk down these steps; they bent an inch or more when stepped on, so I try to stay close to the handrail.

Assembling at the top of the stairs, we are at last given a quick protocol lesson. Hold your scarf draped over both hands, and extend them to the king when you are presented. He will put it over your head, we’re instructed.

We enter the audience room. It has a dusty charm – good rugs, plenty of wooden furniture, and many pictures and other decorations on the wall. I approach the king. He is an old man seated on a comfortable bench.

Best of all, he’s wearing a watch cap and dusty boots.

We line up, scarves are placed over our heads, and we sit for a cup of tea. I put my bottle of whiskey on a table beside the king. He beams at me.

We sit, silent. The king occasionally looks over at us, but he obviously feels no need to make small talk. OK, I think, time to call on my rusty diplomatic chit-chat.

I open with praise for Mustang. It is translated. He gives me another smile. I introduce Gordon. Another smile, but less wattage. It’s becoming clear that small talk from visitors is not especially welcome. Instead, we’re told that when we’re finished our tea, we can kneel beside the king for a photo. We chug our tea and kneel for photos. The audience is over.

We make our way down the rickety stairs. The handrails are more necessary but less visible on the way down. We must go slowly, feeling for each step. When we get to the construction zone, my suspicions about livestock are confirmed. From the shadows, a mastiff begins barking. He’s savage, and determined to get at the intruders. Holes in the palace wall provide just enough light to see him in profile, straining against a chain and kicking up dust as he lunges at us. Taking the steep steps slowly and carefully becomes less of a priority. Half walking, half sliding, we burst through the palace door and tumble into the street.

Aug 14, 2011

We can hear the monks chanting as we get up, followed by children's voices. Apparently, the whole village begins its day at the gompa.

We begin ours with a soul-destroying haul out of the valley, past the villagers watering their horses and tending to their herd. It’s only a 300 meter climb, but the altitude requires a self-conscious deep breathing rhythm if I don’t want to stop every 20 steps. I may finally have to admit that Gordon can now out-hike me. He is keeping up with our guide while I consistently lag back a few yards or more.

When we get to the top we’re just over 4000 meters. We descend rapidly to Ghemi, where we have an early lunch. The scenery is beginning to change, opening out into big dry hills, a bit more watered than New Mexico or Utah but with the same broad vistas of a rolling country mixed with eroded sandstone in vivid yellow and orange.

As always in a country of irrigated oases, the last mile or two to the next village is downhill. We’ve got some toys and books for the school in this town, called Tsarang. We don’t know much more about it than the name of the headmaster, and at first our guide reports that it’s closed. But the tearoom proprietor recognizes the name and remembers Liesl Clark and her two kids. She calls the headmaster, Mr. Bista, and he shows us to the school.

Many of the teachers are nuns, or anis, and the students can become monks or nuns if they have a calling, says the headmaster. The Ani School, as it’s called is far more basic than the school in Kagbeni. The kitchen is a simple stove and a few pots. Classrooms have nothing but blackboards and benches for sitting and for writing. The school does have an impressive solar electrical system but no way to store power, so anything requiring electricity needs to be done while the sun shines. The school also has one pretty new desktop computer (though a laptop would have been better given the power setup); the headmaster confessed that he knew nothing of the computer or what software it runs.

In contrast to the extremely basic facilities elsewhere, the library is spectacular – a big room with floor to ceiling bookshelves filled with Tibetan, Napal, and English works. Many US elementary schools have no better.

We hand over our maps and books, and I set to work on an enormous inflatable globe donated by a partner who asked only for photos of me blowing the damn thing up at altitude. An odd mix of generosity and cruelty, I thought, but he’ll get his photo.

The kids descend on the toys, paying special attention to a toy I had my doubts about – a felt house with felt furnishings that can be stuck to the house – felt chairs, felt tables, plus toilets, cats, dogs, bathtubs, clothes for the Mother and Father, and on and on, a cornucopia of felt goods that look grotesquely excessive in this simple school.

Many of the items are clearly not familiar household items in Tsarang. (I doubt most of these kids have used a sit-down toilet in their lives.) But the teacher uses the toy as a horizon-broadening device, describing each item as she helps the kids place it in the felt home. Mostly this works. But her explanation for the bubble-bath foam that goes with the bathtub is greeted with a mix of merriment and disbelief.

Aug 13, 2011

We start today by continuing the grim uphill that brought us into Chelle, but the trail soon levels off to something more reasonable. We pass a piece of heavy machinery working on the road. Lord only knows how they got it up the slope that so disheartened us, but it’s a reminder that this region won’t be accessible only to walkers much longer.

The Chinese have already built a good dirt road from the Tibetan border to well south of Lo Manthang, so that only the country we’re hiking today separates the Nepali and the Chinese roads.

The isolation tells. We are now deep in the last traditional Tibetan territory left in the world. Rams' skulls hang over doorways. At meals we are offered Tibetan bread (lightly fried, pita-like, and tasty) and Tibetan beer imported from the other side of the border. We pass people crushing rocks by hand to make the mineral dyes that color the mani walls and the gompas, or monasteries.

Stretching our day to 8 hours, we take several long slabbing trails in and out of side valleys, gaining altitude steadily until we hit 3700 meters. The trail is wide – probably to accommodate herds of goats and horses – but the dropoff is steep. Sidetrails lead to heart-stopping suspended footbridges.﻿﻿﻿﻿

We are suffering a little from altitude – on the uphill slopes, breathing itself feels like a chore. We’re stronger on this third day, but that doesn’t make the uphill sections easy.

Arriving at last in Ghiling, an hour past our original destination, we admire the monastery and hear that the monks are celebrating Buddha’s birthday. We head up.

In the main room of the temple, six or seven monks sit in two facing rows perhaps eight feet apart. A long thin table stands before each row of monks. Some of the monks are young boys of perhaps twelve; others are mature men. One of the younger monks is reading a bit hesitantly from a piece of paper that has been folded so often it is coming apart in his hands. When he finishes, all the monks begin chanting. A worshipper makes the rounds, bowing to each monk and putting a few bills on a light scarf resting in front of the monk. The monk folds the scarf over the money and resumes chanting, throwing what look like small seeds in the air and ringing a bell at frequent intervals. The chanting reaches a climax with a sudden burst of drumming and horn playing – loud and dissonant to my ears. Then the chanting resumes.

A monk gives me a flashlight so I can see the pictures on each wall. They seem a weird mix of Buddhist and Hindu representations, very bright and well-executed. And well-preserved, if the inscription – 1797 – can be relied upon.

Tonight’s lodging is the most basic yet and the weather is colder, but we have beds and warm blankets. The toilet, however, does not bear further description.

Aug 12, 2011

Today we’ll finally leave the vast gravelly bed of the Kali Gandaki river, climbing to 3,000 meters. We begin by dropping to the Kali Gandaki and crossing a few of its braided channels on makeshift wooden footbridges. The trail then takes us up onto hills and cliffs overlooking the river.

We set a blistering pace, bolstered by maximum strength ibuprofen. Sandstone rises on all sides, often as great cliffs. In a few places, manmade caves have been hacked from the sandstone, probably in the days when raiders marched regularly through the valley. The caves may once have been reached by steps and handholds carved from the rock, but these have long ago eroded away.

After a few hours, we stop for lunch at Chhusang, the last truly Nepali village along our route. From here we’ll climb away from the Kali Gandaki and into regions more influenced by Tibet's culture than Nepal’s.

Like all the villages, Chhusang's gardens have high walls to keep out wandering livestock. We walk next to a shallow stream that has been diverted to slab along the hillside and then drop to the walled gardens. There it irrigates a several-acres oasis -- startling green against a landscape that otherwise resembles the drier parts of Wyoming.

Crossing the Kali Gandaki for the last time on a metal foot bridge, we immediately begin climbing a slippery sand and gravel trail that wriggles chaotically up a steep slope – and marks the real boundary between Nepal and the ancient Tibetan kingdom of Lo.

The altitude makes itself felt now; we strain to breathe deeply enough to keep moving. After an unrelenting 15 minutes, we’ve raised our altitude two or three hundred meters and are entering Chelle, the first Tibetan village of the region.

Chelle too has the region's distinctive walled oases, dominated by stands of apple trees that look nothing like the apple trees of North America. The architecture of the town is distinctive too, and so is the atmosphere. There are far more animals; indeed, they share the town, and even the homes, with the human residents.

Cows, mules, and goats get the bottom floor of most homes, while people get the top floors. The homes feature an interior atrium, making it easy for the residents to keep an eye on their livestock. A roof closes off the atrium, often topped with glass or plastic to let in light. Otherwise, the roofs are flat, habitable spaces that add what amounts in this dry country to a third f loor. Thigh-high stacks of firewood act like balcony walls at the edge of the rooftops.

I ask whether residents burn the wood in the winter. No, I'm told. The wood is too valuable to burn. If they need a fire, most residents burn twigs and cow dung. These firewood parapets aren't about utility; they're about prestige. Firewood is so rare and expensive that having a cord or two on top of your house is a status symbol -- and thus too precious to burn.

It’s noticeably colder here, and I wonder aloud how having an open atrium works in the long Himalayan winter. Turns out, many of the villagers drive their horses and marketable livestock south along the river, sell the livestock, pen the horses, and head to balmy Pokhara to get temporary jobs.

Lo in winter is a harsh land, with waist-deep snows. But it's just a 6-day walk to a balmy climate. Who wouldn't go if they could? It reminds me of all the wheat farmers in Manitoba who lock their barns and fly to Arizona for the winter.

With every square yard of farmland precious enough to tend by hand, and every animal a part of the family home, overpopulation is always a risk. There just isn't enough land to keep subdividing it for each new generation. In response, I’m told, the Lo people have devised some remarkable cultural innovations.

In the old days, and perhaps even today, brothers might share not just a farm, but a wife. That way, the fields can be handed down from one set of brothers to a single set of descendants. Marrying two men to one woman didn’t produce an excess of old maids, locals say, because girls were often scarce. I don’t have the heart to ask why.

In any event, the gender mismatch might not last long. If a wife didn't produce an heir, her husbands were allowed to take a second wife; the alternative, not having another generation to inherit the fields, was unthinkable.

Finally, the last resort for sons and daughters who didn't inherit or find a mate with prospects was one that the second sons of European nobles would have recognized – organized religion. Unmarried men and women were sent to monasteries where they worked and held the land in common.

I mean it literally. The raja and his remnant kingdom are tucked high in the Himalayas between Tibet and Nepal at an altitude of 12,000 feet and more. And with the shadows growing long, I am cold.

So, protocol can go hang. What I want to know is whether there are any more clothes I can put on before we meet the Raja of Lo. I'm wearing a watch cap, a rain jacket, cargo pants, and long underwear. Not enough. After walking four days to get to Lo Manthang, the kingdom's ancient capital, we’ve already got on all the clean clothes we brought with us. And most of the dirty ones.

I feel a little guilty. I spent nearly four years representing the United States in meetings with foreign officials -- meetings where it was a major faux pas to wear the wrong lapel pin. The kingdom of Lo has can trace its roots to 1380; it has had a king about three times as long as the United States has had a president. And I am going to sit down with its king wearing dusty hiking shoes and a watch cap.

I am pretty sure our protocol officer wouldn’t have approved.

Our guide entered the room. “Quickly please!” he said. “The raja will see you now.” I rise to my feet and head down to the street, stopping only to tuck a small bottle of local whiskey into my pocket.

Saturday, May 14

The bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara bumps and squeals down the steep, winding grade. The high-pitched squeal of brakes is an annoyance, except when the road pitches down and we can see, too easily, over the road’s edge. Then, the wail of the brakes has a kind of comfort in it.

We are leaving behind the press and clamor of Kathmandu. Out on narrow terraces eked from steep hillsides, we see farmers harvesting corn, cutting down everything and carrying out bundles of corn stalks on their backs.

Hours later we arrive in Pokhara – a bustling little south Asian town at Annapurna’s feet. The next day, we are up early for the short flight around Annapurna to Jomsom.

Sunday, May 15

We arrive at 5:30 for a 6 am flight. At 6, nothing has happened. We're on Nepal time now. When it finally takes off a couple of hours later, the flight rises over some steep hills, turns right at the giant peak, then cruises up a steep valley, with mountains rising above us on both sides.

The plane doesn’t exactly descend to land in Jomsom. We just keep flying at more or less the same altitude until the airfield rises to meet us.

Jomsom was until recently the jumping off point for most treks into the ancient kingdom of Lo. The kingdom and the territory around it are now known as Mustang, and Mustang has long been restricted territory. Foreigners were barred until the 1990s, and even now a permit (and a hefty fee) is required to trek in Mustang. Jomsom is the administrative and governmental capital of the region.

Nepal’s officials check our permits for the Mustang restricted area. They also tell us to change our plans. Our entire trek was planned around a festival in Lo Manthang – a religious ceremony featuring indigenous music, dancing, masks and costumes. But it turns out to be a moveable feast, and the event has been moved back a couple of weeks. We can't postpone our trek at this point. We'll have to miss the festival. It’s like this morning’s flight, I think. If you’re on a timetable, you’re bound to be disappointed in Nepal. Rolling with the flow is the only path to contentment. And, on trips like this, nominal goals like the festival are in the end a kind of maguffin – the term Alfred Hitchcock used for the otherwise meaningless object that drives the plot.

Besides, we've got another maguffin. Three of them, actually. We’re carrying books and toys for three of Mustang’s schools. This is almost a tradition for us; when we hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru, we brought a bunch of our kids' outgrown toys and helped a local group distribute them at a mountain schoolhouse. This time, I've gotten advice about local schools from the Alex Lowe Charitable Foundation. Our kids are grown, and their kids are too young to have castoff toys, so I've solicited contributions from friends and colleagues, who have loaded us up with 25 pounds of books and toys. We need to find the schools and drop off three loads as we work our way up the valley to Lo Manthang. Our first dropoff is in Kagbeni, at the end of today's hike.

Mustang is in the rainshadow of the Himalayas, with annual rainfall roughly equivalent to the Great Plains of North America. The mountain slopes are steep and arid but they do not drop into a V-shaped valley. Instead they stop abruptly at a wide flat expanse of gravel with a thin braided river – the Kali Gandaki – wandering among the rocks. The original valley floor must have filled with centuries of glacial runoff. Perhaps someday this will be a pastoral scene, with a river ambling back and forth through grassy meadows. But for now the valley holds nothing but softball-sized rocks from edge to edge. In this whole expanse, there is one tree and no grass. The valley must be filled with raging snowmelt each spring, stripping away any plants that have gained a foothold since the last flood.

Working up the valley, we cross the braided river a couple of times on wooden bridges cobbled together from random debris. Then our path rises to a new road clinging to the right side of the valley, just above the river bed. We start out at a brisk pace, but even with porters to carry much of the load, I’m soon sweating and lagging, losing ground whenever I stop to take a photo. It’s a short day, with little altitude gain, but we’re already at 2800 meters and not in hiking shape. I'm glad when, after an hour and a half of hiking, we come to a small village with a teahouse. We order sweet milky tea and rest.

Refreshed, another half an hour of walking brings us to Kagbeni. The lodge has a great glassed-in dining room overlooking the largest green patch for ten miles around – 4 acres of oats and barley that dip and wave in the constant wind like the sea. It’s mesmerizing.

Liesl Clark of the Foundation has told me to look up Kunga Tashi, who leads the School Board and runs the “Dancing Yak” Restaurant. Kunga turns out to be a strikingly young man with a passion for the school. He tells me that it has recently expanded and now takes boarders as young as four and as old as sixteen. Especially in the higher grades, almost all the kids who want an education must become boarders. There are only about six or seven schools beyond tenth grade, and they have to serve a nearly roadless region the size of West Virginia.

Thanks to foreign and Nepalese government assistance, the school charges nothing for tuition, room or board. The Foundation's contribution is an extremely well stocked library to which we'll be adding toys and some books and maps. The smallest kids are on break, and they come in to road-test the toys. The most immediate hit is a set of two blocks with half of a vehicle pictured on each face. If kids successfully pair the front and back end of the vehicle – a fire engine, say, or a motorcycle – they are rewarded with a sound that matches the vehicle.

I know just enough Nepali to communicate this concept to a gaggle of four-year olds. “G ood?” “No good?” I ask, pairing the fire engine with the motorcycle. “No good,” they shout. When I finally get it right, with their help, they are startled with delight at the fire engine's loud siren. Then each kid gets a chance to match a different vehicle and discover the sounds of success.

I am determined to get some play value from this toy because I had my doubts about bringing wooden toys, which are almost as heavy as they are politically correct. In the end, though, the weight was worth it. And the kids’ enthusiasm for the other toys – tinker toys, jigsaw puzzles, and a set of Dr. Seuss flash cards – made it feel like Christmas.

We get a tour of the school and plenty of tea. They have no computers for the kids. A Danish group had sent one a couple of years ago, but the mouse doesn’t work. At the suggestion of Liesl Clark, we've also collected laptops from friends and colleagues. These we've left with the Open Learning Exchange in Kathmandu, where they'll be refitted with Linux and some Nepali and English learning programs. Liesl asked that we not take the laptops themselves to the schools because the students and faculty will need training before the computers are actually used. Considering their weight, we're happy to oblige. In any event, the school doesn't now have table space or a free room to put computers in.

It’s building more, though. The young men at work on the new building clearly understand twenty-first century global fashion. They wear low-slung, gravity-defying pants and a variety of branded shirts. As an apparent concession to Kagbeni's constant wind, they have covered their faces, often with kerchiefs that make them look like train robbers or wannabe-anarchist WTO protesters. But their work methods are closer to the ninth century. To move a large pile of rocks fifteen feet, they form two lines and toss stones rhythmically from one worker to the next, bucket brigade style.

Leaving the school, we have time to explore Kagbeni. Women are daubing a mani wall in traditional colors made from local minerals. Mani walls hold a long string of prayer wheels. Passersby can walk to the left of the wall and turn the entire string of prayer wheels without breaking stride.

Signs of religious devotion are everywhere in Kagbeni. It is an ancient monastery town -- though it looks more like a fortress. And perhaps it was. Fortresses are established to protect valuable assets, and the most precious resource in this dry and vertical land is probably the 4 acres of flat and irrigated barley just outside our hostel. The Buddhist monastery here dates to the 1400’s and was once maintained by hundreds of monks who farmed land up and down the valley but could retreat to defend the fortified town in a time of war. Now, though, the monastery's population has dwindled to 40 – half of them students – plus a couple of remarkably large and mean guard dogs, who bark fiercely down from a rooftop that isn’t quite far enough above our heads.

The main worship room of the monastery shows telltale signs of the monastery's declining fortunes; much like an over-stretched British peer’s stately home, it mixes impressive art and history with cracked windows and tawdry modernizing touches, like the twisty fluorescent bulb that hangs down in front of a centuries-old statue of Buddha.

Apr 23, 2011

Next month, my son Gordon and I are continuing a long tradition of dubious hikes (see, e.g., our heat stroke hike out of Antalya, Turkey). We’ll be trekking up into the Mustang region of Nepal. Closed to outsiders for many years, Mustang borders Tibet and partakes heavily of Tibetan culture.

I’m writing about it here because, in some of our past hikes to remote areas, we’ve turned treks into schleps, carrying toys and other supplies to village schools. The best part was getting our kids to donate their much-loved but outgrown toys to the cause. We still treasure a few photos of our mundane suburban toys in the hands of Peruvian schoolchildren (like our pillow-fencing set, right).

Unfortunately, our kids are now at that awkward age where the only toys they still have are reserved for their children, who are too young to have outgrown much.

So I’m throwing the opportunity open to readers of the blog, or at least their children. If you’ve got kids over, say, ten, and they want to donate some of their educational toys, I’ll schlep them to Nepal and deliver them to one of three schools/libraries in Mustang that were started in memory of Alec Lowe by some of Lowe’s fellow mountaineers. And, assuming my camera keeps working, I’ll bring back a picture of Nepali kids making use of each toy.

The school/libraries are part of some very intimate and admirable work the Alec Lowe Charitable Foundation has done in Mustang. One of their libraries is pictured, left. Liesl Clark, a moving force in the library campaign, tells me that educational toys and books in English would be quite welcome. The libraries serve kids from preschool to secondary school, so there’s no age cutoff.

And what if you’re too old to have outgrown toys lying around? That’s just a question of redefining toys. Liesl says her latest project is to acquire laptops from the US, reformat the drives to Linux, and add educational software in Nepali and English:

A new program we're working on is getting laptops into the libraries that are preloaded with Nepali-English learning software by our partner, Open Learning Exchange Nepal. If you are interested in donating any old laptops for the cause, please let me know and I can have a colleague pick the laptop(s) up from you in Kathmandu so they can be loaded with the software for the libraries. We did a pilot project with my old laptop and it was wildly successful. We hope to have at least one laptop in each library within a year.

(Here’s a nice short film that gives a feel for Mustang, and for the laptop project.) So if you’ve got a laptop or netbook that’s been gathering dust since you switched to an iPad, this is your chance to put it to good use.

The three Mustang libraries are in Kagbeni, Tsarang, and Chhoser, near the old capital of Lo-Manthang. For further background about the locations your kids’ toys would benefit, check out the online PBS photo-tour of the region.

Since we’re leaving in just a couple of weeks, and since there’s a limit to how much we can carry, I suggest that you email me at stewart.baker+schlep@gmail.com as soon as you decide you’re interested in making a donation. Let me know what you’d like to donate and where you are. If demand is overwhelming, or time is short, we may have to limit contributions by weight or by location (I can pick up donations in the Washington DC area). And, if you’re willing to donate cash as well, I’ll get information about how you can air-freight any laptops I can’t carry to Katmandu for pickup by the Open Learning Exchange.

Nov 19, 2009

Up early today, we rent the boat of
a local fisherman.We’ve spent most of
the last week within a hundred yards of the sea, but this is the first time we
have ventured out on it.In fact, if our
difficulties have shown anything, it is the unlikelihood of coastal travel
except by sea.In summer, this is
extraordinarily difficult country -- arid, steep, and broken underfoot.In contrast, the sea could not be more
welcoming.There is scarcely a wave upon
it, and the temperature close to the coast is like a bath.There is no doubt that we could have rowed
the same distance that we walked with less effort.Rowed, hell, we could have swum the whole way
with less effort.This insight is
crucial to understanding the history of Lycia, which for thousands of years has
been about controlling the seaports and thus the valleys that run down to the
seaports.To conquer the port was to
conquer the valley, because valley-dwellers had no practical way to move their
goods into any other valley.Coastal
travel was all by sea. Touring by boat brings us in some ways closer to the
history of Lycia
than hiking.

We’re taking the boat out to a
“sunken city.”Aperlae was not the only
Roman town to drop into the Mediterranean
during the earthquake of 40 A.D.Offshore from Uçağiz is an island where another old town suffered the
same fate.We putter along the
steep-sided coast of the island for a kilometer or more, passing the remains of
a prosperous Roman town – wharves, steps, and houses cascading down to the
water’s edge. All of these structure
have dropped below the waves, where they still can be seen extending under the
water to the old wharf line perhaps five or ten meters offshore.

The
area is aggressively protected.No
swimming is allowed, no snorkeling, no diving, even mooring is
discouraged.Here, for the first time in
days I feel like I am in western Europe, reading the rules in all their length
and multilingual seriousness.I miss the
casual comfort with the detritus of history that we felt at Chimaera and Aperlae.

To
give ourselves a short last hike, we ask to be dropped at Simena.This is the largest town in Turkey that is
not connected to the Turkish road system.It has a well-preserved Genovese fortress on its hilltop. The walls are
topped with shelters the size of tombstones, giving the top of the fort the
appearance of a child’s carved pumpkin mouth. Inside the fortress are
structures left by earlier settlers, including a pocket-sized amphitheater,
with seats for perhaps 200 people cut straight from the stone.

Everywhere
we have gone, the best-preserved remnants of Greek life are the theaters.But here, looking at this tiny clone of the
theaters we’ve seen all across Lycia,
it occurs to me that for the Greeks the need to build these things must have
been almost primal.Why else carve one
from stone for such a tiny community?Theater must have had the same power for the Greeks that television has
today – so powerful that even the poorest citizens and communities demand
access.

We
head out the back of the fortress, past a suburban sprawl of Lycian tombs and
down the trail that links Simena to mainland Turkey. Once down the hill, we need
only cross a cow posture (“Must be rich,” I now find myself thinking when I see
someone’s cow), and we are back at the old Moslem cemetery.As we march on, I can’t help noticing the
trash along the road.There’s trash
everywhere in Turkey.Part of the problem is that plastic floats,
so it tends to wash up on the shores of even the most remote and charming
inlet.But another part of the problem
is the Turks themselves.They litter
casually.I’ve seen something like this
in Korea
too, where massive numbers of people hike into the mountains to enjoy the
nature beauty and leave behind a new mountain of trash.Maybe it’s part of the development process –
perhaps there’s a point in a nation’s prosperity where it’s an irresistible
thrill to be rich enough to throw away a potentially useful container.

This
is our last hike. We are on the bus to Antalya
by early afternoon.We check into the
Doğan Hotel, but what we really want is an old-fashioned Turkish bath.The hotel sends us to a 600-year old hamam
just up the road. For two hours, we are scraped, pulled, massaged, and lathered
within an inch of our lives.A fair
amount of skin comes off in the process, and a good thing, too, because the
only way to remove some of this dirt is to take the skin with it.At last, we drag ourselves back up the
stairs. After the inside of the hamam, what had been the swelter of the town
seems as cool and gentle as an air-conditioned office.We sip apple tea and trade stories with the
hamam staff.

Nov 16, 2009

Today’s day hike will go in the other direction, back toward
Kapakli. We begin by climbing the acropolis just outside Uçağiz.We’ve become pretty jaded about acropolises,
never having found more than a few foundation stones at the top of these
hills.But this area also contains an
impressive jumble of old Lycian tombs, standing like big square stone treasure
chests, every one broken open by tomb robbers centuries, if not millennia, ago.

Today, for the first time, we will
be walking in the same direction as Kate Clow’s book.Despite this advantage, we quickly lose the
trail.A signpost directs us into a
field.We wander there for a bit,
looking for the first blaze.As we’re
doing this, an aging woman comes into the field with a rake.

“Where to Kapakli we go?” I
ask.

Usually, my Turkish is so obviously
rudimentary that people simply gesture broadly in deference to my doubtful
mental competence.But this woman
uncorks a stream of voluble and extraordinarily emphatic Turkish that goes on
and on and on.I think she may be giving
me her considered views on the moral ambiguities of ecotourism.I try my biggest smile and the one phrase of
Turkish I’m pretty sure I know how to say properly.

“I don’t understand,” I grin.

Undeterred, she launches back into
her disquisition.We are finally rescued
by an older gentleman working in the neighboring field.He calls us over and points out the beginning
of the trail.Then he too has a lecture
to deliver.I’ve been wondering what all
these people are doing in the fields.He
shows me that they are harvesting strange, twisted black pods, perhaps five
inches long, an inch wide, and a quarter inch thick.They look a bit like oversized dried-out
brown peapods.He hands me one, then
bites into another.I do the same.It tastes good -- a bit like dry fig.

The
man tells me the pod’s name, then puts two of them up to his head and bends
over, waving his head back and forth.I
have no idea what to say or do.It
doesn’t seem to be a fit, and I can’t connect it up to ecotourism either.Later, back at Orun Pansiyon, Jacqueline will
explain that the name for this fruit translates as “goat’s horn.”And, indeed, the twisted pods do resemble
the horns of the many goats we’ve seen over the past few days.Turks swear by these fruits as a source of
vitamins and energy.

Trying
to look as though we’ve been enlightened by the river of information that has
just rolled over us, we bid the old fellow good-bye and head off down the
trail, which runs along the side of a walled Moslem graveyard.Parts of the graveyard contain the
well-tended graves of recent generations.But the wall encompasses a few acres, and much of it is entirely overrun
by head-high scrub, from which a few decaying stone markers poke like stray
rocks

Apart from that short climb, the
trail is flat and easy.After five or
six kilometers, we leave the trail and start across country toward a Genovese
fortress perched on a hill off to the south.Our attention is focused on the tower when someone behind us shouts,
“Hey!” in a tone that can only be American.In fact, it is a solo backpacker, probably a college student, from Oregon.He is the only American we’ve seen on the
trail, indeed the only hiker of any kind we have seen in ten days.I know he’s shared our experience, because he
has the same tinge of fear in his voice when he talks about running low on
water. When he looks at our water bottle, I see in his eyes what the man under
the 7-Up umbrella must have seen in mine. Luckily for him, today we’ve carried
an absurd quantity of water.We share
some.He is afraid to ask for much.We talk trails for a while, give him tips
about the trail to come, and part.

At the foot of the
fortress, we find a cove.It is filled
with beautiful blue water, cooled in spots by a freshwater spring.The family that owns this land has a crude
hut near the spring.They’ve turned it
into a kind of restaurant for the endless succession of cruise boats that
putters into the cove carrying an international clientele.The clientele gets a quick dip and a taste of
Turkish pancakes.We’ve walked two and a
half sweaty hours to get here, packing all our food and drink with us.I suppose we’re entitled to resent the
discovery that our solitary hike suddenly has a soundtrack – a pulsing cover of
“Mambo No. 5.”In fact, though, we find
the blaring cruise boats more diverting than annoying.They might as well be from Betelgeuse for all
the relevance they have to the country we’ve just traversed.We’re content to sit on the rocks and watch
the tourists boogie across the decks with the same bemused air as the
restaurant owners.For two or three months
a year, I imagine them putting up the restaurant sign around noon and making
extra food.Soon, “Mambo No. 5” drifts
across the cove for a couple of hours, and people hand them money for a few
pancakes.Then life goes back to normal.

Nov 12, 2009

We like Orun Pansiyon.We decide to make it the base for a few day trips on the Lycian Way.That way we can leave most of our gear
behind.Today, we will continue our
wrong-way tour of the trail, marching west to the ancient city of Aperlae.

Starting
out, we walk along the main street.The
town is tiny, perhaps 40 houses in all, but it has 15 or 20 shops.Carpets, copper, ceramics, spices, fruit,
groceries, and nuts – all prepared and displayed for the tour boats that dock
here everyday.It may be touristy, but
it makes for a colorful and pleasant stroll.Turkey
in August is a late-rising place and the shops are just opening at 9:30.Less than five minutes after setting out, we
have left the village and are alone with the brush, the sea, the stones, and
the trail.It’s hot, but this trip will
be different than the rest of the week.Gordon is carrying no pack, and mine is far lighter than I’m used
to.The track is nearly level, the wind
blows steadily across our sweat-soaked bodies.No longer beasts of burden, we suddenly see why Kate Clow loves this
country.

With
the sea on our left, we roll along a trail that wavers up and down a few meters
as it skirts a bay that gradually dwindles down to a shallow inlet. We amble
footloose for an hour, passing a cool spring that seems to be gushing directly
into the sea.Finally, the trail begins
to rise across the first peninsula.We
cache a bottle of water.Soon, we can
look back on the village and the host of cruise ships scattered across the
harbor.

Now
we enter a wilderness of stones, some rising ten feet from the ground, bright
white in the harsh sun.The trail
threads its way through and around these monoliths.Offthe trail, the space between the stones is filled with thorny brush that
makes it nearly impossible to travel.For once, we cannot lose the trail, no matter how hard we try.Remarkably, this unwelcoming ground seems to
be pastureland, at least for goats, more common here than on any other part of
our trip.

Now the trail alters again.The great stones fall away, and we are
crossing a flat spot that most Americans would call a stony field scattered
with occasional weeds.To us, however,
after a week of Lycian landscapes, it looks the Turkish equivalent of Ireland – green
and inviting in a way we haven’t seen before.Looking down on this lush land are three abandoned houses.We can’t imagine why someone would move away
from the scene of such agricultural bounty.

Soon
we arrive at Aperlae.Aperlae was never
more than a modestly important town.But
it took a big hit in 40 A.D., when an earthquake dropped the entire
neighborhood several feet.This was
particularly hard on Aperlae’s seaport. Large parts of the old Roman waterfront
are now under water (and likely to stay so, since Mediterranean
Sea levels have been rising for centuries. After exploring the
tombs and fortress walls that climb the hillside near Aperlae, we take to the
water with snorkels and masks borrowed from the pension. We spot still-intact
warehouse walls lying in the shallows.Farther out, we can trace the old harbor wharves and quays.Here, seriously deep water is separated from
water only six feet deep by a straight-edge run of stonework that almost
certainly marks the spot where Roman galleys tied up to deliver their cargo.It is a magical place.Apart from an occasional tour boat moored far
offshore, we have it to ourselves.

Walking
back, it’s clear that Gordon has recovered from our troubles.Instead of the monosyllables in which he
spoke during the long, tough hours of past hikes, he is energetic and almost
talkative. We stroll back, losing the trail only occasionally, and arriving a
good half-hour before dark.

Nov 09, 2009

We wake to a beautiful dawn.This campsite, which it was too dark to fully appreciate last night, is
the best yet.We’re up early, and it
looks as though we at last will get off well before the day warms up.

We
are still remarkably thirsty, so we brew up more water for hot granola and for
endless liters of tea. But something is definitely wrong.The tea, which tasted fine yesterday, now has
the same metallic nastiness as last night’s lemonade.I look at the pots we have been boiling the
tea in.Small bits of crystal are
deposited here and there on the aluminum.

Is
it possible, I think, that the constant heating and shock of cold water has
somehow precipitated aluminum salts?Suddenly the last word that has me slapping my forehead.“D’oh!” I exclaim. I’m astonished at my own
stupidity.These aren’t aluminum salts,
they are plain old sea salt.This is the
first river we have seen that has actually broken through to the Mediterranean.Those
long, looping, oxbow curves should have told us just how flat the river is when
it reaches the sea.There’s plenty of
current, and probably plenty of fresh water, in the river, but the lighter,
warmer seawater has been floating back upstream while the colder fresh water
has been driving downstream.The result
is a brackish mixture of salt and fresh water.

This
explains why we couldn’t quench our thirst.The more we drank, the more salt we consumed, and the thirstier we
got.

If
I’d thought about it, I’d have realized that the first clue was from the oracle
of Apollo.I jeered at the idea that
saltwater fish might show up in a fresh-water spring.And of course they didn’t.They showed up in a mixture of salt and fresh
water.If I hadn’t been so sure I was
right and the oracle story wrong, I might have spotted this earlier.

What
to do?We certainly can’t keep drinking
the Mediterranean.After exploring upstream and finding salt
water even far inland, I give up the idea of an early start, trek into the
nearest town, buy a couple of gallons of water and hike back.

After
creeping across the hobbit bridge, we start up the trail we descended last
night.Again and again, we lose the
trail and are forced to guess our way through an area of thorny scrub.Fragile, loose, white stone is everywhere
underfoot.The rocks range in size from
hens’ eggs to hippopotamus backs.The
rock breaks easily.Indeed, in one spot,
someone has hollowed out a large boulder into a rectangle the size and shape of
a hot tub, though not so deep.Every
other step we take is on or off one of these uneven broken rocks.Often the trail is nearly impossible to
follow where it is not painted.There is
so little dirt that the traditional trail finding clues are often missing.Instead, we rely increasingly on the reddish
stains left by the soil when feet (and hooves) carry it onto the white
rocks.Time and again, we find the trail
simply by stepping from rock to rock, putting our feet on the spots that seem
most dirtied by other passers-by.

The
trail slabs along a fairly gentle slope, perhaps thirty meters from the sea
slapping lightly at broken stone.It is
a relief not to be humping up headland after headland.We’re sweating hard, but we can’t ignore the
beauty of the landscape.

As
the day unfolds, we hike along an old Roman road, stop for lunch and a swim
near an ancient Roman lookout tower, and find only one source of water – a
cistern whose stagnant water has been growing less appetizing every day since
the rainy season ended a few months back.It seems unlikely that we will be able to reach the next town, called
Uçağiz, tonight.That means another
night of camping.But the prospects that
we will be able to find water for our next camp are not good.

We
decide to detour to a nearby village and buy water.The village, Kapakli, is on a height
overlooking our trail, and there is no obvious trail to it.We stumble through new construction, stone
fences, and pits for new greenhouses.When we finally stagger up to the main street, Kapakli is deserted.Three or four mongrels slink sideways along
the road away from us. There is not a store or a vehicle to be seen.One woman walks into the middle of the street
and stares, apparently wondering whether to run.We turn down another street, hoping to find a
grocery street.Nothing.No one.

We
return to the main street.The woman’s
husband has joined her.I approach him
with my best Turkish.

“We
go water buy where?”

He
doesn’t bother to respond, just gestures to us to follow him home.Instead of selling us water, he serves us
glass after glass, then adds a half-liter to the remaining stores in our
pack.

The
man, Mr. Balei, could not be a better host.He and his wife bring out two kitchen chairs and put them on the
concrete patio of their home.After
Gordon and I have sat down gratefully, his wife brings out a small box for Mr.
Balei to sit on.Apparently, we have
occupied the only movable chairs he owns.His wife brings freshly washed grapes, on which we gorge.

Mr.
Balei must be a fairly prosperous man by the standards of Kapakli.He has a young wife and a small son, several
goats causing a ruckus trouble in a separate building, and a garden.He says, with the air of a man who’s done it,
that the best way to reach the town of Uçağiz
is to walk along the road for about four hours. Offering thanks, we set
out.After an hour or so, a fast car
driven by an Italian couple stops in the middle of the road and offers us a
ride.Delivered from three hours of
walking on hot asphalt, we leap at the proposal.

The
way into Uçağiz looks like a road in the American southwest, winding past red
earth, white rocks, and scrub brush arranged on hillsides whose geology is laid
bare to the eye.Up and over a ridge, we
begin the plunge down to Uçağiz.Suddenly there are houses on both sides of us and the street is a
narrow, one-lane, twisting passage filled with curious observers and a few
budding tourist touts trying to get us to park in their driveways.

We
spot a pension we heard about on the trail – the Orun Pansiyon. We are met by
Jacqueline Orun, a Dutch woman married to the Turkish proprietor.The house faces the main street, but its
single central hall leads straight to a patio and dock ending in a picturesque
bay.Five or six neighboring piers also
wend their way crookedly out into the water.Tourist boats, yachts, and the everyday dinghies are tied up at each
pier.Boats come and go, the passengers
hopping off and wandering into the reception area of the hotel with the
vegetables they intend to sell at market.We shower and sit on the patio, drinking endless bottles of water until
it is time to eat and go to bed.

Nov 05, 2009

Over breakfast, we decide to hike to the city of Olympos, where there are a number of well-preserved ruins,
then take a bus to the next wild section of trail, which begins at the ancient
city of Myra.

The
ruins of Olympos are evocative, though less well preserved than at
Phaselis.One can walk old Roman roads
on both sides of the river, where the city’s wharves are still standing.An old theater remains as well.Perhaps most touching is a recently excavated
tomb, which features a Lycian sea captain’s affectionate tribute to his old
ship, beached and never to sail again.Thieves have broken into his tomb, like every other that we have seen.

Back
at the pension, we pack up. By 3:30, we’re in Myra.We’ve still got a fair amount of hiking to do, but we cannot resist a
tour of the site. An enormous theater still stands, including numerous arched
entrances and exits.The stone carvings
are extraordinarily well preserved and detailed.There’s also a small tomb city, or
necropolis, carved from solid rock to resemble wooden cabins for the dead.

The
climb out of Myra
is harsh and steep, but the breeze is strong now that it’s past 5:00.At the top is an old fortress standing
perhaps 30 or 40 feet tall.After a rest
at its foot, we press on.We soon lose
the trail among the rocks.We guess our
way forward, following one goat trail or another in the general direction we
think the trail was going.We eventually
come to out to the main road, and then to a side road overlooking Sura, an
ancient oracle site where we expect to make our camp. Kate Clow says the oracle
was a whirlpool that filled with water and fish when a sacrifice was made. The
prediction varied depending on which fish appeared in the whirlpool.According to Polycharmus, the fish sometimes
included such ocean-going species as seabass, bluefish, even sawfish and
whales. Kate Clow notes that the source of the whirlpool, a fresh-water spring,
can still be found on the site.

I
have my doubts.I suppose it’s possible
for a spring to create a whirlpool, but what sort of fresh-water spring could
support ocean-going salt-water species?The oracle, we can see from here, is a mile or more from the sea, at
least by way of the river, which oxbows back and forth across the valley,
scraping the cliffs on either side.Cute
story, but Polycharmus doesn’t sound too reliable to me.

We
swing with determination along the road, finally reaching the trailhead by7:00.It will be full dark in an hour.Still, we should be at the bottom in 40 minutes or less.

Unless
we get lost.Which of course we do,
twice.Each time, we retrace our steps
and find the trail again.But now we’ve
used up our luck.The sun is down. The
red-and-white blazes look black-and-white now, and the trees and rocks are full
of black-and-white marks.By 7:45 we are
still high on the ridge, plunging along switchbacks, desperate not to lose the
trail again and just as desperate not to slow down.At least the trail is finally done meandering
and seems to be headed more or less directly to the river and the beach.It seems darker every time we make a turn on
the switchbacks.But luckily the trail
has descended into scrub, and it is easier to follow.Below, we eventually see the beach. Then we
can see the river.We keep plunging
on.At last, with the moon rising, we
reach the bottom and stand at the river’s edge.

Relief
is followed by doubt. With our feet on the bank and our backs to the cliff, we
realize that there is no place to camp here. Across the river is a vast expanse
of beautiful camping-friendly beach, but this is the biggest river we have
encountered, deep enough even now in the depths of summer to break through the
beach and pour into the sea.Looking
around, we see a bridge.Of a sort.It looks as if it were built to illustrate a
Tolkien novel.Branches, most no thicker
than a finger, have been tacked together to form three or four crude ladders
and then lashed into an arch.The whole
thing dips and swoops a few feet above the river, its wobbly legs perched
precariously at the edge of each bank.

Left
with no better choice, we start across.There is no handrail for most of the crossing.Where there is a handrail, it is 18 inches
high.I crawl.The river rolls on below me.I have no difficulty seeing the river through
the bridge.In fact, it’s easier to see
the river than the bridge.But, to our
surprise, the bridge holds.Gordon follows.

In the dark, we set up
camp. Wood is hard to find. The river, however, is cold and
refreshing. We take off our boots and
walk into the center to fill our bottles for the evening meal. It is late, and we are tired as the water
boils. Perhaps it’s the exertion and
stress of the last few hours, but nothing tastes good. Tonight, in the hopes of
avoiding insomnia, we are making hot lemonade rather than tea, but there’s
something wrong with the lemonade mix. It
gives a metallic taste to everything and leaves me craving the last of the
water we bought in town. My mouth feels
pasty and coated, and I wash it out with the store-bought water, which seems to
help a bit. We are seriously dehydrated,
and relief is not coming quickly. I
drink three liters of hot lemonade and go to bed still unsatisfied.

Nov 02, 2009

Next morning, we eat breakfast in style, seated in plastic
chairs borrowed from the cabin.We tank
up on tea and boil three more liters to carry with us.Water will be scarce on the next section.

The
next cove is inhabited by a group of commercial fishermen camped out in the
detritus of an abandoned mine.The
roofless stone mine buildings have an coal-gray Industrial Age solidity and
grimness.The fishermen’s section is
more modern –all flimsy plastics and bright, open-sided shacks.A bunk bed with bedding has been moved out on
to the beach.

Kate
Clow says we can get water from the fishermen, but the place is deserted.We don’t want to wander around the empty
houses, so we head for the next headland.At the top, the trail disappears entirely.Finally we stop looking for blazes and simply
plunge down a dry creek bed.

This
looks like a good place to sit out the noonday heat.The gravelly beach is deserted, though one
speedboat lies at anchor.The boat is
from Guernsey.They don’t wave, and neither do we.Perhaps they resent the intrusion.Perhaps they’re English.

This
beach is nearly inaccessible by land.The entire valley is a few hundred meters square.Cliffs drop straight to the sea at both
ends.But even here the quiet beauty is
marred by an accumulation of plastic bags and bottles discarded from passing boats.The water is utterly calm.We float quietly on our backs, washing our hiking
clothes at the same time.The hike
drains away.

We
doze in the shade.The Guernsey
boaters loll on the front of their vessel.I‘ve never quite understood the appeal of boating.It’s like having a second home – just one
more damn set of housekeeping chores.Then I think about what we’ve been doing for much of the last few days –
finding drinkable water, building a fire, making and breaking camp.What is that if not a kind of
housekeeping?Yacht owners must value
the experience for the same reason I value hiking – it offers a kind of
housekeeping that is utterly absorbing because it has to be, because mistakes
have such harsh consequences.That
demanding regime is what makes my law office seem so remote and irrelevant,
which is a large part of the reason for taking a vacation in the first
place.So, in a way, the only difference
between me and the Guernsey yachtsman is that
when I’m done housekeeping I can store my gear in a spare closet.Well, that and the fact that my gear doesn’t
seem to have attracted two topless twenty-something women.But what the heck, the trip isn’t over yet.

We
rouse ourselves to look for the trail out.While I’m thrashing around the back of the valley, cursing Kate Clow
through thick brush and up steep hills, Gordon strolls to the end of the
beach.When I show up fifteen minutes
later, bathed in sweat with bits of brush clinging to everything from socks to
hat, he tells me the trail begins just down the beach.

My
mistake was a natural one, since the beach ends in a cliff.Nonetheless, there’s the blaze.We put one foot up, then the other.There is indeed a path here.As long as we don’t look back.

Water
is now a worry again.We drank a lot in
the lunch cove, and the river there was dry.We are hours from the next source of water, and hiking in the heat is
wringing us out fast.We reach the top
of the next headland and look down into a tiny cove, the last before we tackle
the big ridge between us and a settlement called Cirali.It’s a beauty.Just two dozen yards of beach between the
steepest cliffs we’ve seen so far.

And
there on the beach, all alone in an empty Eden,
someone has planted a beach umbrella.No
car, no boat.Just the umbrella.It should be incongruous, maybe even
offensive, but in fact it’s a nearly perfect note of domesticity, and I’d
admire it completely except for one thing.As though to mock our thirst, the umbrella is entirely covered by a
giant 7-Up logo.We’re down to about a
cup of water each, with hours of heavy hiking ahead, and they want me to think
about 7-Up?

Soon
the trail starts down the hill, then it disappears.Did it slab off to avoid the cove?We decide it was committed to the descent and
push on.This will be a very serious
mistake if we are wrong.Even if the
trail does descend, we could be on some goatherd’s track that ends in a
cliff.Climbing back this way with our
packs and no water will be hard indeed, maybe more than hard.

At
last we reach the bottom.Then we see a
trail blaze.Below it, a young boy is
pissing against the cliff, his back to us.Spotting us, he stares hard, then scampers for the safety of the 7-Up
umbrella.We lumber up beside his
parents, drop our packs and then ourselves – stunned by dehydration and
fatigue.God knows what we look
like.I try out my Turkish greetings and
small talk.As I hoped, the father pulls
out a large bottle of water from the cooler and gestures to us.We nod.I’m ready to take the bottle.We
could finish it in two minutes.

Instead,
he puts out an eight-ounce plastic cup.Oh, God!He’s giving us a cup
of water!I pass it to Gordon.He hands it back with a few swallows still in
the bottom.They’re gone in an instant,
leaving not the slightest satisfaction.The man seems surprised.He pours
another cup.Gone again in two long
swallows.Another.Gone again.A fourth disappears.He puts the
bottle away.We try not to watch it too
closely as it goes.We offer thanks and
more small talk.It’s time to move.

Toward
the top of the next rise, a wave of fatigue suddenly hits me.My heart is pounding wildly as I drop on a
shady part of the path.I can’t go
on.Like an old acquaintance, I
recognize the early stages of heatstroke.

I
sip the remaining water.Not much left,
and we’re still not at the top, let alone done with the descent.I begin to wonder what would have happened if
the 7-Up family hadn’t shared their water with us.I don’t want to dwell on it.

After
twenty minutes, I feel better.We move
on slowly.The terrain is beautiful, with
the same kind of inborn familiarity as the African savannah.Pines spread sparsely over baking hillsides
strewn with rock and pine needles.Shepherd country.

Half
an hour later we crest the hill and can see the plain spread out below.Roads, houses, and an enormous beach stretch
south.We give ourselves a few swallows
of water and start down with enthusiasm, emerging at last on a road that will
take us to downtown Cirali.At the first
campsite, we find that some blessed soul has set up a water station along the
road.It is the only one we will ever
see, but it comes at the best time.We
drink deep.

In the village, we find a pension
that will give us dinner, breakfast, and two beds for $15.What’s more, they’ll give us dinner
early.Because we’re not done for the
day.

A
couple of miles outside of Cirali is one of the most remarkable ancient sites
in Lycia –
the Chimaera.Most of us vaguely
remember the legend.The Chimaera was a
monster – part goat, part lion, part snake – and it breathed fire.It was finally killed off by a guy riding a
winged horse.(For some odd reason,
we’ve all heard of the horse, Pegasus, but no one has heard of his rider, a
fellow named Bellerophon.Probably has
something to do with Mobil ads.Or
perhaps with Bellerophon’s unattractive qualities.Bellerophon wasn’t his original name, but he
went hunting once with his brother, Bellos.At the end of the trip, Bellos was missing, and his brother was calling
himself Bellerophon – which I’m told translates roughly as “the guy who ate
Bellos.”)

Anyway,
if the Chimaera’s been dead all this time, why walk for miles on top of
heatstroke to see it?Because, the story
goes on, the Chimaera’s flame didn’t die with the monster.Instead, it seeps up from the underworld to
emerge still burning from the earth.And
in fact, at the Chimaera site, flames do leap from the earth in dozens of
places, as they have since ancient times.

A
large government poster tells the Chimaera’s story.(This is a source of all my information about
Bellerophon, which means it probably should be taken with a grain of
salt.)Also according to this poster,
Chimaera has another claim to fame.It
says that the city of Olympos, a few miles down the coast, was the site of the
earliest Olympic games, and the famous eternal flame that symbolized both the
ancient and modern games had its origin at Chimaera.Now this is news.The Olympic games have been celebrated in
modern time for more than 100 years.Desperate network commentators have milked every possible Olympic story
to fill dead air during the high-jump qualifying rounds.But not once have I heard that the eternal
flame might actually still be burning, and in Turkey. I’m guessing that the Greek
officials in charge of Olympic mythology would rather cut out their tongues
(not to mention the network commentators’) before acknowledging this.

We
head up the trail, surrounded by sweating tourists, most of them Turks.We pass the ruins of several different
religions’ temples.(As one religion
fell out of favor, the next was happy to move in and take credit for the
flames.) We emerge on a denuded patch of pale hillside about the size of a
soccer field.All across it flames leap
in the gathering darkness.Some are the
size of a large campfire, others barely cling to the earth with a flame smaller
than that of an oven pilot light.Perhaps a hundred people are scattered across the field, gathering
around one or another of the flames.In
one spot, six or seven flames emerge in a row, and some enterprising Turk has
put a couple of samovars atop the flames and is selling tea brewed with the hot
breath of Chimaera.

I read somewhere that Chimaera’s
source is an underground gas that bursts into flame when it reaches the
surface. To test this hypothesis, I pick one of the smaller flames, lean over,
and blow it out.We wait.It fails to burst back into flame.Scratch one hypothesis.

We
climb to the top of the field and look down.It is nearly 8:00 and growing quite dark.The large flames leap orange across the
field, while numerous tiny blue flames glow along the ground.

In
the United States,
such a site would have its own paved parking lot, an interpretative center, and
a hand-railed walkway graded for wheelchair access.It would be surrounded by its own designated
wilderness area five miles square.National Park rangers would keep crowds ten feet away from the edge of
the flames, confined to the boardwalk.Here, in contrast, two Turkish youths have stretched out their bedrolls
at the top of the field and are cooking sausage over one of the more dramatic
flames.On the whole, I think the Turks
have the better idea.

Oct 29, 2009

We wake up 11 hours later at 7:30.Breakfast is included in the price of the
room, and it’s served out by the pool – goat cheese, boiled eggs, olives,
honey, and bread.

We
start eating, and the eating seems to go on forever.We get up again and again to fill our plates
and glasses.We even drink multiple refills
of the watered-down Tang that Turkish hotesl serve under the label “orange
juice”.(As far as I can tell, Tang was
last served in the United
States in 1971.I suspect that the Turkish army must have
bought up all remaining supplies that year, and some Turkish oligarch with
connections has been making a fortune selling off the government’s stockpile
ever since.There’s no other explanation
to the ubiquity of this pitiful concoction in a country that grows some of the
best oranges in the world.)

Other
guests come and go.We keep eating.The manager grows uneasy.It begins to look as though we’ll eat $25
worth of olives and bread.A waiter
clears our place.We don’t take the
hint.We just get new plates and fill
them up again.And again.The manager can’t bear to watch any
more.He retires into the hotel.At last we are done.Cool, clean, full of liquid and food.We lean back and plan the day.

Today
we’ll be passing through some of Turkey’s oldest seaports.We’ll begin with Phaselis.Since that ancient city is north of us, and
the rest of the Lycian Way
runs south from Tekirova, we decide to leave our packs with the manager (who’ll
agree to anything if we’ll Just Stop Eating), take a bus to Phaselis, and walk
back without the packs.Soon we’re in a
dolmus, rattling a few miles up the coast and climbing down at the entrance to
Phaselis.

Of
all the ruins we will see on the trip, Phaselis may be the most evocative.The town was built on a small peninsula that
is broken by several small harbors, notably a tiny and deep circular inlet used
by the Romans as a military harbor.The
whole harbor is smaller than the floor of a modern basketball arena.The town, too, takes up an area that would be
no more than a few square blocks in a modern city.It’s remarkable how the internal combustion
engine has changed everyone’s sense of urban scale.

Phaselis was settled around 700
BC.By 500 BC, it was wealthy enough to
negotiate as an equal with the pharaohs of Egypt.It had been rich and strong for two hundred
years when Alexander the Great showed up on the city’s outskirts.Showing a well-tuned instinct for the main
chance, the Phaselians invited him to spend the winter with them before he
marched off to conquer the known world.Thanks to its fine harbors, Phaselis maintained a high degree of
independence for centuries thereafter, even acting as a pirates’ haven during
the early years of the Roman Empire.When the city finally became too much of a
nuisance, though, the Romans conquered and destroyed it, finally selling off
the land to a new batch of settlers and incorporating it into the Roman Empire
shortly after the birth of Christ.Since
then, it has been subjected to Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman rule, but the
Ottomans encouraged the rise of Antalya and the decline of Phaselis, which was
gradually abandoned and now lies at the end of a long, nearly deserted road.

The
military harbor still has its sea walls – intact but now sunk below the water
and tumbled about -- and it’s easy to see how a simple chain could have closed
off the little entrance that was left when the Roman engineers were done.Other features of the town include a short
but massive stone aqueduct from the town center, apparently built simply to
make sure that water pressure would stay high for residents near the harbor.

We
climb to the well-preserved and even more ancient Greek theater.From its seats you can see the high mountains
that forced Alexander to winter here.We
sit in the bleachers, where Alexander’s officers and men must have sat as he
laid out the next year’s campaign.Then
we stand where Alexander would have stood.You can look into the eyes of every member of the audience, speak to
them in something close to normal tones.

Back
in Tekirova, we pick up our packs and buy supplies -- a kerchief to wipe the
sweat off my face while hiking, plus lunch for two more days.We eat the first day’s lunch as we walk south
along the Tekirova strip -- succulent peaches and heavily flavored grapes.Turkish fruit is a joy -- still grown for the
human palate rather than the convenience of mechanical harvesters.Gordon eats his oranges skin and all,
observing that he could never eat an American orange the same way.

It’s
midday.Shade is sparse.The guy who sold me this kerchief two
kilometers back wouldn’t recognize it if I brought it back.In fact, I doubt he’d touch it. Soon the
Tekirova strip ends, and a signpost tells us that the Lycian Way is leaving the paved
road.We are embarking on a roadless
stretch of Mediterranean coast.

With
the shadows at their smallest, the tractor path we are following is in full
sun, and it is hard to haul the packs up even the mild slopes of this rolling
countryside for more than half an hour at a time.We take a long break, and by 2:30 the shadows
have begun to creep across the track.We
drag ourselves from shadow to shadow.

But
the country makes it all worthwhile.We
are marching along a coast defined by coves and headlands.We climb the headlands to the breeze and a
view of the deep blue Mediterranean and the
turquoise inlet waters.Then we drop
down to sea level as we pass each inlet and start our climb to the next
headland.

The
first cove we encounter after leaving the blacktop has no cars, but it is full
of tourist boats that have moored here to give a sense of isolation without
actually getting too far from the “No Fear” outlet.The boats are rigged to look like two-masted
sailing ships, but they never use the sails as far as we can tell.Instead they cruise along with a powerful
inboard engine.From the headland, they
make a pretty sight, romantic vessels in a picture-perfect setting. A few
swimmers dive from the top decks.Rock
music echoes off the far headland as we march over the next rise.

Here,
the scene is different.The cove is
nearly deserted.One small boat is
anchored near two rocks that rise straight from the sea.A bright white beach curves from headland to
headland.A winding pool lies behind it
at one spot, like an old river too tired to reach the sea.The path drops straight to the valley
floor, and we walk toward the beach, dying for a swim.

The
water is as warm as blood here by the shore.It cools a bit as we wade to our chests and float on our backs, totally
limp.Refreshed, we explore.The winding pool we saw from the headland is
indeed a river that lacks the strength to break through the last thirty meters
of beach.Instead, the water must be
draining slowly through the sand.But
it’s fresh and cool enough to wash the salt off our clothes and ourselves.

We
lie in the sand for a time.But we’ve
got one more headland to climb. Humping over the rise as the heat eases, we
reach the third inlet and now are utterly alone.A deserted cabin sits at one end of the
beach, Turkish flag flying proudly in the wind.The cabin looks as though the inhabitants left yesterday.Clothes hang on pegs.Plastic chairs sit around a table.But the newspapers littering the ground are
from May.

Exploring
further, we find another failed river just back of the beach.It is deeper than the last, but swampier as
well.A small boat is tied up on the
bank, and we pole out to the center of the deep, river-shaped pond.A turtle swims below the boat, startlingly
visible in the clear water.We fill our
bottles.The water will have to be
boiled to be safe, but it’s fresh and there’s plenty of it.

Sleeping
under the sky, the night air is perfect. There seems to be no barrier between
our bare skin and the soft air. The stars and half-moon shine down
brightly.Every few minutes, we catch a
distant rhythm -- music from boats moored at offshore islands.

Oct 26, 2009

We arise refreshed, break camp, haul on our packs, and cross
to pick up the trail.Which,
unfortunately, is nowhere to be found.Back at our camp, there’s a trail marker not ten feet from the water,
and higher up are the blazes we followed down to the river.The trail must cross the river.We search again, this time without packs,
going upstream and down, climbing the far bank in hopes of intersecting the
trail.If this is Kate Clow’s trail, it
should climb the ridge that marks the far bank, drop to the main valley then
climb to Göynük Yayla.But, rereading
her description, we read that our campsite is not exactly the “grassy open
spot” she describes.This isn’t her camp
and we may not be on her trail after all, despite the red and white blazes.

Have
we missed a turnoff earlier?We pack up
and walk slowly back to the puddle with the dead fish.There are no branch trails.

Perhaps
with lighter packs or cooler weather (we are already sweating heavily), we
would scramble downstream to the main valley, counting on crossing the main
trail sooner or later.But yesterday has
made us cautious.We are no longer sure
that we’ve ever been on the Lycian
Way, and we’re not ready to double what looks more
and more like a bad bet.We decide to go
out the way we came in, looking again for Kate’s landmarks now that we’re
traveling in her direction.

But
the trail still has a few tricks up its sleeve.Just after a spot I’m sure I remember from the trip down, we turn a
corner and find – a pure clean spring, with water pouring out of a pipe and
into a large stone trough.How could we
have missed this on the way down, when we needed it so badly -- only to find it
now, when our water bottles are still full?Is Kate Clow the magical realist of trail guide writers?

In
fact, without warning, we’re on a new trail, also blazed in red and white.It’s going in the same direction, but unlike
yesterday’s trail, this one searches out the views (and the long drops) to be
found by hugging the cliffs where each ridge drops into the valley.

Trudging
up the same slope we came down yesterday afternoon, we relive the first harsh
hours of the previous day’s hike.But
things are better today.We are still
pouring sweat, still soaking our clothes, but the trees keep the sun off our
heads.And the cliffs offer not just
great views but strong breezes.

Sitting
in the shade after a long climb, looking at the tiny braided river far below,
feeling the breeze evaporate moisture from our shorts, we are almost
content.Except for the fact that we
don’t know where the hell we are and have been forced to retrace our steps.

Soon,
though, we do know where we are.Kate
Clow’s landmarks passed unrecognized while we were going west, but now they
leap into focus on our eastward journey.Bathed in sweat at midday, we reach the top of the climb and start
down.On the rocks, painted messages
advertise Ali’s Garden Café.

When
we get down, we’ll want a cold drink – at least a liter or two of cold drink,
in fact.Ali’s Garden Cafe begins to
sound better and better.Especially
because the only alternative is Mr. Malik’s establishment, and we’re, well, not
that eager to see him again.We’d have
to admit that, in fact, we couldn’t get there from here.And face the contempt of his bandit
father.Silently, we agree.Ali’s Garden Cafe is our destination.

Descending
out of the forest and into the sun, we find the trail full of loose
stones.They slide under our feet as we
jolt down the path.Who would have
though that going downhill would be such hard, sweaty work?

At
last we reach the irrigation ditch, the river.And the stark unshaded rocky road in full afternoon sun. It’s forty
minutes to Ali’s Garden Cafe from here.We are steeling ourselves for the walk when behind us we hear the
clip-clop of horse hooves.We turn to
see a peasant wagon headed our way. Actually, it is a peasant cart that’s been
turned into a tourist attraction, complete with tourists.The young Turk with the reins says something
to the tourists, stops, and waves us up onto the cart.It’s a miracle!Now we sit under an awning, jolting over the
harsh rock instead of struggling to swing our tired legs down this
unprepossessing stretch of baking road.The tourists, meanwhile, eye us warily and try to stay upwind.

We
don’t care.Ali’s Garden Cafe is coming
up.We can taste the cold drinks.Our cart trots right up to the front door.And past it.We aren’t stopping at Ali’s, and as hitchhikers it seems rude to insist
on being dropped off.Especially because
I now see that the driver has handed a card to the tourists.It is an advertisement for Malik’s pension.We are driven directly to Mr. Malik’s front
door and sent into the café.So this is
the price of the ride – a glass of water and a large serving of crow.Mr. Malik conveys in rough German his surmise
that we spent the night lost on the mountain before admitting he was right.Neither my German nor my Turkish is equal to
a more elaborate explanation.Indeed,
I’m not sure how much more there is to the story.

His
father stares down stonily from the wall.As quickly as decency permits, we decline dinner, hoist our packs, and
walk out to the main road.There we flag
down a dolmus to Tekirova.Tekirova is a
“strip city” – a Turkish version of the strip city that can be found all along
Route 1 in the U.S.Hotels spread out along the beach, while the
road runs behind them.Across the road
are the pensions and grocery shops and leather goods stores and restaurants
that serve less affluent tourists.So
arriving in Tekirova is has an element of ambiguity; somewhere along the strip,
you have to decide you’ve arrived.At
what looks like a vaguely urban clump of shops, we decide we’re there and get
off the bus.

We
walk to the nearest pension, drop our packs outside, and I stroll in to
negotiate the usual discount off the hotel’s rack rate, trying to look like a
tourist who’s left his car at the curb and would easily try another half-dozen
establishments if the price isn’t right.This might not work if the desk clerk has a good nose; so I stand well
back from the desk.Success; the price
for a double room (With air conditioning!I try to contain my glee.) drops a third to about $25. We move in, showering in our underwear to kill
two birds with one stone, wander around in town luxuriously unburdened by our
packs, eat a modest meal in a courtyard restaurant, and do some window
shopping.The stores are tiny, but the
brand names are all too familiar.One
shop seems to be devoted to “No Fear” clothing, all sold at prices that
resemble those at Target stores in the U.S.Compared to Tekirova’s charms, bed looks
good.

Oct 22, 2009

We carry our packs to a dolmus stop.Dolmuses are a combination taxi, bus, and
minivan.They run a standard route but
will stop anywhere along the route if hailed.Dolmus also appears on most Turkish menus, where it refers to grape leaves
stuffed with rice and delicacies.It’s
the concept of being “stuffed” that the two uses have in common, so it’s not
hard to imagine what the trip was like.

On
the other hand, dolmuses are efficient, cheap, and a good way to force
ourselves to learn a few basic Turkish phrases like, “Where is the bus to
Göynük?How much does it cost?”

These
phrases come in handy on the outskirts of Antalya,
where we switch to an intercity bus.It’s also here that we encounter our first difficulties with Kate Clow’s
guidebook.She has written the book from
west to east, so that it ends near Antalya.So we’re starting near the end of her
guidebook and walking toward the start. This means reading all of her
directions backwards, but since she’s written the book in short segments, this
does not seem too hard.One segment ends
at the coastal town of Göynük,
which looks like a good place to begin our hike.

Except
that Göynük is not on the map that Kate Clow has supplied.And on a close reading of the text, Göynük is
simply listed as a good place to hike out for supplies – perhaps two or three
kilometers off the main trail.So we
actually have no idea exactly where in Göynük we should start.I’m hoping that we can just go to the town
center and start from there, but the driver asks for a specific location.I tell him we’re going to “Göynük Yayla” –
the high Göynük mountain pasture that is on the Lycian Way.He thinks for a moment, says “OK,” and a half
an hour later drops us in the middle of nowhere.He points to a rough track headed west, into
the hills, and says “Göynük Yayla” with emphasis.

Well,
this is not exactly downtown Göynük, but we see a few some crude painted signs
that say “to the waterfall” in German, and the driver seems pretty sure of
himself, so we drag our packs out of the dolmus.The bus drives off, leaving us blinking in
the hot sun.

Strapped
into the packs, we begin marching along a dusty road toward the Germans’
waterfall.Immediately, we begin
sweating seriously.This is dry country,
and there’s a big difference between the temperature in sun and in shade.But the air is not as dry as the
country.I estimate that humidity is in
the 40 to 50% range – low enough so a good breeze brings refreshment, high
enough so any exertion, especially in still air, quickly builds a saturated
microclimate around our bodies.Our
sweat no longer cools, it simply drips everywhere -- into our eyes (mixed for
piquancy with sun tan lotion), down our backs, along our legs, and into our
heavy boots and socks.

Of
course, there’s one problem.We had
planned to buy bottled water, bread, cheese, and a few other supplies in
downtown Göynük.There aren’t any stores
on the dirt road we’re following now.In
fact, so far, there aren’t any buildings.We march on anyway.Perhaps we’ll
find the center of town this way.

We
don’t.But we do find Mr. Malik.Mr. Malik runs a inn (or pension) about
twenty minutes’ walk down the road we are following.He speaks only a little English, but we get
by in Turkish, German, and English, each of us trying to speak the other’s
tongue and relying on German as a fallback.Mr. Malik is not a Turk, he says with emphasis.He’s a Macedonian, from the Balkans.He shows us the framed picture of his father,
hanging on the wall above two wicked looking daggers that could double as
swords and would come in handy if you had an elephant you needed to disembowel,
quickly.

The
old man looks like he knew how to handle the daggers, too.He stares fiercely out at the frame, piercing
eyes above a thoroughgoing bandit’s mustache that must have been his pride and
joy.“Why are you wimps sitting in a
café when you’ve got mountains to climb?” he seems to say.

Well,
for a start, because his son insists that we can’t get there from here.The trail is out – rockfalls or
something.But Kate Clow’s book was
published less than a year ago, and she doesn’t say anything about
rockfalls.We invoke her authority, and
Mr. Malik wavers.Or perhaps he sees
that we’re going to try no matter what he says.He sells us water and fills a plastic bag with bread and goat
cheese.As we leave, he waves
warily.I suspect he’s worried about having
to bring our bodies out next week, and who will pay for that?

We
soon come up on a second pension and café – “Ali’s Garden Café.”It has a map out front for German
hikers.It looks nothing like Kate
Clow’s map, but after long study we conclude that Ali’s “Pfad No. 1” (Path No.
1) will take us to a place that also seems to be on her map and that avoids the
waterfall that Mr. Malik assured us was a dead end.We march up the road, looking for Pfad No. 1
and grumbling about Kate Clow’s mapmaking and route descriptions, which have
left us without a clue how to find her trail from Göynük.

We save some ire for the Turkish
government.Ordinarily, we’d buy good
contour maps of the route, and that would allow us to identify roads, rivers,
mountains, and routes on our own from the map.But
the Turkish government, which has such maps, refuses to release them to the
public.National security, it says.Perhaps they’re afraid the Greeks will come
back -- storming ashore to set up a Lycian National Liberation Front in the
mountains -- and use the maps to launch raids on Göynük.

So,
mapless, we march on, the sun falling heavier and heavier on the dusty white
road.The way is still flat, running
near a dry riverbed, but the ground is rising steeply all around.Soon we’ll have to launch ourselves on the
real hiking.Right on schedule, a rough
arrow painted on a rock points us off the road to Pfad No. 1.We cross the river, then a small open
concrete irrigation channel, and the trail launches itself up the slope.

Now
it’s really hot.The brush provides only
occasional shade.The air is heavy and
still.Our shirts sweat through, then
our shorts.We have only two thoughts –
putting one foot in front of the other and hoping to God we aren’t on the wrong
damn trail.Because the only thing worse
than grinding up this hill would be heading back down to start over somewhere
else.On past vacations, we have hiked
for an hour, taken a break, then hiked another hour.Now we can barely plod twenty minutes without
a rest.Sitting in whatever shade we can
find, we consult Kate Clow’s guide, which naturally describes this stretch of
trail (if it is this stretch of trail) with the breezy fondness of a
woman walking downhill.We don’t
recognize any of the landmarks she ticks off on her jaunty descent.But Gordon points out that many of the trail
markers match the red-over-white blaze depicted in Kate Clow’s book.This is comforting, though inconclusive.For all we know, that’s how all Turkish
trails are marked.

As
we keep stumbling up the mountain, Gordon begins to look bad – flushed and
slowing, even though we stop often for water breaks.Around noon, after another break, he walks a
hundred meters and stops dead.Heat
stroke.

We
drop onto our packs and think.I jog
outside in the Washington
summer, I’m familiar with heat stroke.In fact, it’s a standard feature of my first run in temperatures over 90
degrees.Plus, there was the infamous
Baker family incident at Yosemite, when my daughter and I walked a friend of
hers from Germany
most of the way up a set of valley switchbacks, stopping only with her friend
dropped unconscious on the trail from heat stroke.

That
time, we poured water on her and walked her back down.But here our options are more limited.We don’t have enough water for that.Besides, if water could cool us, why hasn’t
all this sweat we were soaking in do the job?And walking out isn’t much of an option unless we want to call off the
hike.How could we face Mr. Malik, whose
doubts we’d brushed off?How could we
face his bandit father, who probably ran down other men’s goats on this very
trail just for a change of diet?

Still,
Gordon can’t go on like this.Since I am
feeling better than him, I decide to carry his pack as well as mine.This is really brutal.But it works.Soon, Gordon is looking better, sometimes leading the way and doing the
trail finding.After an hour or two, he
gets his pack back.What a relief.I now appreciate the joke about the guy who
hits himself with a hammer “because it feels so good when I stop.”

We’re
still at least half lost.We’ve seen one
or two spots that might correspond to Kate Clow’s descriptions, but we’re
missing more than half of them.We
reread the already memorized paragraph.Have we really spent an agonizing day on one measly paragraph?Or is it worse than that?After describing a long stretch of trail,
Kate says that it “eventually” crosses an irrigation ditch, the only landmark
we’re sure we’ve seen.Perhaps all our
sweat and heatstroke is encompassed in that one word.The thought is too much to bear.Still, the view to the north across the valley
is what we expect.Besides, the trail
has begun to descend.We’re not going
back now.

As
we’ve climbed, the brush has grown up in a sparse evergreen forest.The trail is shaded now, and the landscape
has a classic charm.Stark white rocks
and twisted three trunks break through a carpet of pine needles.The trail is dead quiet.We have not seen a single human being since
leaving the road.Our breaks are
peaceful and calm, though in the still air of the forest every part of our
clothing is saturated with sweat.And
we’re running out of water.

Among
the guidebook’s landmarks that we haven’t seen are the springs and water
sources Kate describes.This is
serious.You can’t sweat for hours the
way we have – drops falling every second from arms and face – without replacing
fluids.We started with well over a
gallon of water, but it’s nearly gone, and we’re deep into fluid debt.

If
we’re right about our location, we’re descending to a stream that divides two
mountains and then merges with the main river.Kate describes a charming camping site on the shores of the stream.And even if we’re not there, this trail is
clearly going into a major valley, and it’s hard to believe there isn’t water
at the bottom.

At
3:30 we stop for lunch.Hammered by the
heat, we’re still not hungry.We just
figure we should eat.Mr. Malik’s goat
cheese has leaked all over the plastic bag, soaking much of the bread.

“Ordinarily, that would be
disgusting,” Gordon says as he digs in, “but right now it’s just a good source
of fluid.”

In fact, we cannot eat the dry
parts of the bread.We don’t have enough
saliva to soften it, so chewing and swallowing the harsh crust seems to cut our
mouths.

Suddenly,
as the trail swings around the bottom of a ravine, we spot a pool.Of a sort.It’s actually more of a mud puddle, actually, topped by a fuzz of green
algae.As we approach, frogs leap to
safety in the three-inch-deep swamp.

“Hey,” Gordon says, “if frogs can
live in it, how bad can the water be?”

“Fish, too,” I say, pointing to a
small one, which is unfortunately floating on its side at the surface.

Still,
it’s clear we’ll be drinking this water, using our purification tablets, unless
we can find a better source upstream.Luckily, exploring a hundred meters upstream we find another pool.No scum, no dead fish.A frog jumps in as I approach, and the water
is so clear I can watch him swim several feet to the bottom and try to hide in
the shadow of a stone.In fact, I can
see him sitting in the shadow watching me take off my shoes and wade in up to
my waist.It is cold but not
freezing.Nothing could be better.

Gordon
joins me.We treat the water and then
drink it by the liter.When we finish,
the world seems very different.We are
cooled, dried, and no longer desperately thirsty.It is past 5:00.The air is merely warm.

A
few minutes’ hiking brings us to a larger stream wide enough to require
boulder-jumping to cross.At the edge of
the stream is an area that must have been mud in the spring, so perfectly
smooth is the ground.It will make a
perfect place for the tent.It is surely
the camping place with water that Kate Clow told us to expect.We are on the trail!

We
swim again while boiling water.The air
is just a bit warmer than balmy.We will
need no sleeping bags.We boil and
drink, boil and drink.There is no end
to the boiling and drinking.

By
8:15 it is pitch black.I lie out on a
rock in the stream on a kind of natural chaise lounge that spring floods have
smoothed into the top of this great boulder.The stars are sharp.Life is
good.

Oct 19, 2009

After our flight to Antalya, a taxi takes us to the old city.
Down a few alleys, around a few shops and cafes that seem to be doing all of
their business in the street, and we’ve arrived at the Doğan Hotel – a rambling
complex of houses built around a garden and swimming pool.(At least the brochure called it a pool.In the United States, we’d fill it with
warm water and call it a hot tub.)

Antalya stands on cliffs
that are broken briefly by the old port, a tiny inlet made nearly circular by
two breakwaters.The cliff walls here
are heightened by ancient Byzantine (and older) stone fortifications.One can easily imagine the great ships of
vanished empires rowing up to the docks between the high stone walls.Now, the walls echo with the thrum of
outboard and inboard motors, as wooden tour boats and fishing vessels putter in
and out of the harbor.

Beyond
the harbor, across a large bay, I catch a first glimpse of our destination –
the high mountains of Lycia.In the dusty evening light, they rise one
behind the other like paper cutouts.However two dimensional they look, though, one of the dimensions is
definitely up.The coastal mountains
seem to soar straight out of the sea, and the range behind them is just as
steep and twice as high.For the first
time, I realize how tough the next few days will be.

Oct 15, 2009

On
top of everything else, my son is falling into heat stroke.We’ve been dragging our packs and too little
water up the dusty mountain trail for hours, the Turkish sun lying like a dead
weight on our heads.Our shirts, our
shorts, even our socks are sodden with sweat.We haven’t seen another hiker, another human, since we started up the
trail, and we’ve been half lost or worse for almost as long.Now this.Gordon stops, stunned, in the trail.He is flushed a dark red, and he complains that his heart is running out
of control.He’s no longer sweating. He
can’t walk any farther.I’m only in a
little better shape.

But
we can’t stop here.The next water is
over the mountain we’re climbing.If
we’re on the right trail, that is – something I’ve come to doubt as we slogged
up the endless ascent, trying desperately to match our guidebook’s landmarks to
the trail we’re on.There are no
signposts, and we can’t expect a park ranger to come along.We’re deep in the Turkish mountains on a
trail that hardly existed a few years ago, a trail that few have heard about,
let alone hiked.

Well,
if nothing else, heat stroke is a good excuse for a break.We drop our packs and fall onto them, hoping
for a breeze.Two days ago,I was practicing law in Washington, DC.Just how did I manage to get us into this fix
so quickly, I wonder.As usual, it’s a
long story, and it begins with a book.Casting about for a summer hiking trip with my son, Gordon, I learned
that Turkey had just opened
its first long-distance hiking trail – the 500-kilometer Lycian Way -- linking the mountains and
coastline of Turkey’s
Mediterranean coast between Antalya
and Fethiye.An Englishwoman, Kate Clow,
had just released a guidebook, and The
London Times had already rated the Lycian Way one of the world’s ten best
hikes.

I
was intrigued.I’ve traveled in Turkey before
and liked it, even though the country has been relentlessly trashed by the
American media.Most of us saw “Midnight
Express,” an Oscar-winning movie in which the young drug-smuggling hero is
cruelly mistreated in a Turkish prison.What none of us realized at the time was that the screenwriter, an
unknown by the name of Oliver Stone, was launching an entire oeuvre of politically correct lies
served up as fact.In fact, Turkey is by no
means a perfect country.But it looks
pretty good next to its neighbors – Syria,
Iraq, the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria,
Greece, and the former Yugoslavia.

The
trail sounds delightful.The Lycian Way winds
through 6000-foot mountains.It passes
Mediterranean coves and inlets that cannot be reached by road, promising
solitary noontime swims as a break from hiking.It drops into villages and climbs to mountain pastures that rarely see
visitors, let alone foreigners.And it
carries its hikers through a mass of history unmatched by any region of the
world.When Alexander the Great marched
through this neck of the woods, wintering near Mt.Olympos,
the Lycians he met must have viewed him as an upstart barbarian.They already had a centuries-old urban
culture.The Lycians yielded in the end
-- first to Greek, then Roman, then Byzantine and Genovese and finally to Arab
and Ottoman influences – all of whom left homes and religious buildings strewn
casually across what are now lonely goat pastures.